The Psychology of Creative Writing

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the psychology of creative writing The Psychology of Creative Writing takes a scholarly, psychological look at multiple aspects of creative writing, including the creative writer as a person, the text itself, the creative process, the writer’s development, the link between creative writing and mental illness, the personality traits of comedy and screenwriters, and how to teach creative writing. This book will appeal to psychologists interested in creativity, writers who want to understand more about the magic behind their talents, and educated laypeople who enjoy reading, writing, or both. From scholars to bloggers to artists, The Psychology of Creative Writing has something for everyone. Scott Barry Kaufman, Ph.D., completed his doctorate in cognitive psychology at Yale University in 2009. He also holds an M.Phil. in experimental psychology from the University of Cambridge, where he was a Gates Cambridge Scholar, and a B.S. from Carnegie Mellon University, where he studied psychology, human– computer interaction, and voice performance. In his research, he combines various perspectives, including cognitive science, philosophy, and evolutionary psychology, to further an understanding of intelligence and creativity. In addition to publishing more than 20 book chapters and articles in professional journals such as Intelligence and Journal of Creative Behavior, he is co-editor of The Cambridge Handbook of Intelligence (with Robert J. Sternberg, forthcoming). Kaufman’s work has been covered in media outlets such as The Philadelphia Inquirer and Men’s Health. Additionally, he writes a blog for Psychology Today called “Beautiful Minds.” He is the recipient of the 2008 Frank X. Barron student award from Division 10 of the American Psychological Association for his research on the psychology of aesthetics, creativity, and the arts. James C. Kaufman, PhD, is an associate professor of psychology at the California State University at San Bernardino, where he directs the Learning Research Institute. Dr. Kaufman’s research focuses on the nurturance, structure, and assessment of creativity. Kaufman is the author or editor of books either published or in press, including Creativity 101, Essentials of Creativity Assessment (with Jonathan Plucker and John Baer), International Handbook of Creativity (with Robert J. Sternberg), and Applied Intelligence (with Robert J. Sternberg and Elena Grigorenko). His research has been featured on CNN, NPR, and the BBC and in the New York Times and New Yorker. Kaufman is a founding co-editor of the official journal for the American Psychological Association’s Division 10, Psychology of Aesthetics, Creativity, and the Arts. He is also the editor of International Journal of Creativity and Problem Solving and the associate editor of both Psychological Assessment and Journal of Creativity Behavior. He is the series editor of the Psych 101 series. He received the 2003 Daniel E. Berlyne Award from APA’s Division 10, the 2008 E. Paul Torrance Award from the National Association of Gifted Children, and the 2009 Western Psychological Association Early Career Award.

The Psychology of Creative Writing Edited by

Scott Barry Kaufman Yale University

James C. Kaufman California State University at San Bernardino

CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS

Cambridge, New York, Melbourne, Madrid, Cape Town, Singapore, São Paulo, Delhi, Dubai, Tokyo Cambridge University Press The Edinburgh Building, Cambridge CB2 8RU, UK Published in the United States of America by Cambridge University Press, New York www.cambridge.org Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/9780521881647 © Cambridge University Press 2009 This publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to the provision of relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part may take place without the written permission of Cambridge University Press. First published in print format 2009

ISBN-13

978-0-511-59538-7

eBook (EBL)

ISBN-13

978-0-521-88164-7

Hardback

ISBN-13

978-0-521-70782-4

Paperback

Cambridge University Press has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of urls for external or third-party internet websites referred to in this publication, and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate. Information regarding prices, travel timetables, and other factual information given in this work are correct at the time of first printing, but Cambridge University Press does not guarantee the accuracy of such information thereafter.

For my “Granny Smith,” Jeannette Robbins Gorodetzer, whose ditties, spirit, and good cheer I shall cherish and remember forever and ever. Like I promised, this one is for you. – sbk For my mother, Nadeen Laurie Kaufman, who read every story, poem, or play I ever wrote, complete with red markings in the margin (“Show, don’t tell”). I love you, Mom! – jck

contents

Contributors

page xi

Foreword Robert J. Sternberg

xv

Preface

xix

Acknowledgments

xxiii

part i: the writer 1 The Personalities of Creative Writers Jane Piirto 2 The Creative Writer, Dysphoric Rumination, and Locus of Control Samaneh Pourjalali, E. M. Skrzynecky, and James C. Kaufman 3 “The more I write, the better I write, and the better I feel about myself”: Mood Variability and Mood Regulation in Student Journalists and Creative Writers Ad`ele Kohanyi

3

23

41

4 Characteristics of Eminent Screenwriters: Who Are Those Guys? Steven R. Pritzker and David Jung McGarva

57

5 The Tears of a Clown: Understanding Comedy Writers Scott Barry Kaufman and Aaron Kozbelt

80

part ii: the text 6 The Evolution of Creative Writing Daniel Nettle vii

101

viii

Contents

7 Literary Creativity and Physiognomy: Expressiveness in Writers, Readers, and Literature Martin S. Lindauer

117

8 The Literary Genius of William Shakespeare: Empirical Studies of His Dramatic and Poetic Creativity Dean Keith Simonton

131

part iii: the process 9 In Search of the Writer’s Creative Process Todd Lubart

149

10 Writing as a Collaborative Act R. Keith Sawyer

166

11 Writing as an Interaction with Ideas Mark A. Runco

180

12 Creative Cognition in Science Fiction and Fantasy Writing Thomas B. Ward and E. Thomas Lawson

196

part iv: the development 13 Writing in Flow Susan K. Perry

213

14 Writer’s Block and Blocked Writers: Using Natural Imagery to Enhance Creativity Jerome L. Singer and Michael V. Barrios

225

15 Pretend Play, Emotional Processes, and Developing Narratives Sandra W. Russ

247

16 The Healing Powers of Expressive Writing Janel D. Sexton and James W. Pennebaker

264

part v: the education 17 How Rewards and Evaluations Can Undermine Creativity (and How to Prevent This) John Baer and Sharon S. McKool

277

18 Teaching Writing by Demythologizing Creativity Grace R. Waitman and Jonathan A. Plucker

287

19 Creation and Response: Wellspring to Evaluation Genevieve E. Chandler and Pat Schneider

316

Contents

ix

20 Fostering Creative Writing: Challenges Faced by Chinese Learners Ai-Girl Tan

332

21 Putting the Parts Together: An Integrative Look at the Psychology of Creative Writing Scott Barry Kaufman and James C. Kaufman

351

Index

371

contributors

john baer Memorial Hall Rider University Lawrenceville, NJ 08648 [email protected]

PO Box 208205 New Haven, CT 05620 [email protected] ` kohanyi adele Psychology Department Kwantlen Polytechnic University 12666 – 72nd Avenue Surrey, B.C. Canada V3W 2M8 [email protected]

michael v. barrios Department of Psychiatry Yale University 105 Church Street Guilford, CT 06437 [email protected]

aaron kozbelt Brooklyn College of the City University of New York 2900 Bedford Avenue Brooklyn, NY 11210 [email protected]

genevieve e. chandler School of Nursing University of Massachusetts, Amherst 122 Skinner Hall 651 North Street Amherst, MA 01003 [email protected]

e. thomas lawson Institute of Cognition and Culture School of History and Anthropology Queen’s University of Belfast Belfast BT 7 1NN Northern Ireland, UK [email protected]

james c. kaufman Department of Psychology California State University at San Bernardino 5500 University Parkway San Bernardino, CA 92407 [email protected]

martin s. lindauer College at Brockport, State University of New York 311 Oak Court Daly City, CA 94014 [email protected]

scott barry kaufman Department of Psychology Yale University xi

xii

Contributors

todd lubart Universit´e Paris Descartes Institut de Psychologie 71 Avenue Edouard Vaillant 92100 Boulogne Billancourt Cedex France [email protected]

jonathan a. plucker Center for Evaluation & Education Policy Indiana University 1900 East Tenth Street Bloomington, IN 47406 [email protected]

david jung mcgarva Saybrook Graduate School 747 Front Street San Francisco, CA 94111 [email protected]

samaneh pourjalali California State University at San Bernardino Department of Psychology 5500 University Parkway San Bernardino, CA 92407 [email protected]

sharon s. mckool Department of Teacher Education Rider University 2083 Lawrenceville Road Lawrenceville, NJ 08648 [email protected] daniel nettle Centre for Behaviour and Evolution Institute of Neuroscience Henry Wellcome Building Newcastle NE2 4HH, UK [email protected] james w. pennebaker Department of Psychology A8000 University of Texas at Austin 1 University Station Austin, TX 78712 [email protected] susan k. perry Los Angeles, CA [email protected] jane piirto Ashland University 247 Dwight Schar College of Education Ashland, OH 44805 [email protected]

steven r. pritzker Saybrook Graduate School 747 Front Street San Francisco, CA 94111 [email protected] mark a. runco Norwegian School of Economics and Business Administration University of Georgia 323 Aderhold Hall Athens, GA 30602 [email protected] sandra w. russ Department of Psychology Case Western Reserve University Mather Memorial Building Cleveland, OH 44106 [email protected] r. keith sawyer Department of Education Washington University Campus Box 1183 St. Louis, MO 63130 [email protected] pat schneider Theological Union

Contributors 77 McClellan Street Amherst, MA 01002 [email protected] janel d. sexton Department of Anesthesia and Critical Care Medicine Quality and Safety Research Group The Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine 1909 Thames Street, Suite 200 Baltimore, MD 21231 [email protected] dean keith simonton Department of Psychology University of California, Davis One Shields Avenue Davis, CA 95618 [email protected] jerome l. singer Department of Psychology Yale University PO Box 208205 New Haven, CT 05620 [email protected] e. m. skrzynecky Department of Psychology

California State University at San Bernardino 5500 University Parkway San Bernardino, CA 92407 robert j. sternberg Tufts University Ballou Hall, 3rd Floor Medford, MA 02155 [email protected] ai-girl tan Department of Psychology University of Munich Martiusstr. 4, 80802 Munich, Germany [email protected] grace r. waitman English Department Washington University in St. Louis 1 Brookings Drive St. Louis, MO 63130 [email protected] thomas b. ward Department of Psychology University of Alabama Box 870348 Tuscaloosa, AL 35487 [email protected]

xiii

foreword robert j. sternberg

For many years, writing skills were treated as the ugly stepsister of reading skills. Tests of “verbal aptitude” and “verbal ability” comprised assessments of vocabulary, reading comprehension, and verbal reasoning. Writing was nowhere to be found. Even achievement tests of “English composition” created by the College Board often had no actual writing whatsoever. Although Louis Thurstone distinguished between verbal comprehension and verbal fluency in his early theory of primary mental abilities, the former has been widely measured, the latter only rarely. And when the latter was measured, it was typically by tests requiring writing at a basic level, such as writing down as many words beginning with a certain letter as an examinee could think of in a specific time period. In 2008, as I am writing this foreword, the situation in practice has improved slightly. For example, the SAT Reasoning Test (as it is now called, after many name changes) includes a writing section, although it is so formulaic in its conceptualization and scoring that it is not clear how much it measures writing in a more creative sense. And educators are increasingly recognizing the importance of writing for success not only in school but also in later life. Writing has always been much harder to study and measure than reading, because it does not lend itself nicely to multiple-choice or other objective forms of scoring. But psychologists and others are rising to the challenge, as shown by the present book. And I am delighted and proud that the two psychologists who edited The Psychology of Creative Writing are both former graduate students of mine. Creativity has been relatively little studied in psychology, creative writing even less so. It is hard to study. First, whereas participants can sit down at pretty much any time and answer reading comprehension questions or solve mathematics problems, they cannot do the same for creative writing: Sometimes the ideas just do not come! Second, it is hard to assess creativity. Third, the study of creative writing is interdisciplinary, involving cognitive, social, personality, and biological aspects of psychology – and phenomena that best xv

xvi

Foreword

lend themselves to interdisciplinary approaches are often the last to be studied, if only because no one person or team typically has the expertise to study the phenomena as a whole. Yet understanding creative writing is essential not only to psychology but to all of the humanities and many of the social sciences, most notably, psychology. In the psychology of verbal processing, there are various levels of analysis, two of which are particularly salient. One is the study of what one might call the micro-processing of verbal material. In the study of reading, this would include how one processes phonetic information and decodes words. In the study of writing, it would include how one strings together words to form grammatical and meaningful sentences. Of course, even this micro level can be subdivided, but the main focus is on how writing is even possible in the first place. The other level is the study of what one might call the macroprocessing of verbal material. In the study of reading, this would include how one understands a story or an essay. In the study of writing, this level would include how one writes a story or essay. The focus of this book is on the macro level of understanding writing, and the book limits itself to the creative side of writing. The book is catholic in its approach to creative writing. Some of the chapters deal with the psychological processes involved in writing. Others deal with social processes, such as writing as a collaborative enterprise or how rewards can affect the creative writing process. Still others deal with the personalities of creative writers or how writing can help one’s psychological state. The kinds of writing reviewed vary widely: from Shakespeare to screenwriters to the everyday writing we may all do as we face the tasks confronting us in our day-to-day lives. Many themes run throughout this book. In a brief foreword, I cannot possibly cover them all. But I would like to mention one – namely, that many people become creative writers not by virtue of their education, but in spite of it. Indeed, many career creative writers showed no particular promise to be great writers in their school careers. Even when schools or assessments place some emphasis on writing, it is often the kind of writing that is largely expository and in which one is evaluated in terms of how well one meets the mechanical requirements of writing, rather than its creative ones. If there is a single message to this book, I believe it is that schools need to place more emphasis on the creative side of writing (and everything else), and that in doing so, they will produce not only more creative writers but also people who are more creative as they go about their lives. Creativity is largely an attitude toward life. Creative people are those who are more willing to redefine the ways in which they look at problems, to take risks, to seek to overcome daunting obstacles, and to tolerate ambiguity even when its existence becomes psychologically painful. Teaching students how to write creatively helps teach them how to approach life in a creative way.

Foreword

xvii

We live in a time of great challenges, in which the formulas of the past often fail when applied to the present. Indeed, as I write this foreword, Wall Street and much of the U.S. financial system are in a sort of meltdown the likes of which perhaps have not been seen since the Great Depression. If there ever has been a time for the encouragement of creativity in writing and thought, this is it. This book, I hope, will help lead us, as a society, toward that recognition. Arguably, with daunting threats to our survival as a species, our time for recognizing the importance of a creative approach to life is running out. We can only be grateful for books that celebrate the importance of creativity to our existence and survival.

preface

We laymen have always been curious to know . . . from what source that strange being, the creative writer, draws his material, and how he manages to make such an impression on us with it. – Freud (1908)

Who is this strange being that is the creative writer? How can we understand the person behind the creative writer or what process a person may take to write creatively? Can we use this knowledge to nurture aspiring creative writers and even enhance the writing of already established creative writers? In The Psychology of Creative Writing, we offer 20 chapters by top scholars musing on the key components of creativity writing: the writer, the text, the process, the development, and the education. These insights are bookended by our own analyses and thoughts. We have both been fascinated by creative writing and creative writers for as long as we can remember. As a child, Scott would often peer into other worlds, either through writing stories about time travel or reading science fiction such as the Xanth series by Piers Anthony. Today, he works on stand-up comedy writing whenever he has the time, and he tries to sneak away from his work whenever he can to open up a psychological thriller or science fiction novel and escape into another time and place. As for James, he always wanted to be a writer – he was writing stories by the fourth grade, always under the watchful eye of his first mentor, his mother. He continued to write, becoming a sports journalist at age 14 for local newspapers and slowly publishing his attempts at poetry, stories, humor, and essays in a wide variety of tiny magazines and journals. In college he studied under the famed novelist T. Coraghessan Boyle and realized he should find a day job. Continuing to write plays and musicals to this day (and with the very good fortune to see them often performed off-off-Broadway and around the world), James initially began studying creativity itself as a way to understand the creative writer. xix

xx

Preface

We are not the only ones to harbor such fascination. A search on creative writers in PsycINFO returns 755 results; searches on creative mathematicians and creative painters return 58 and 97, respectively. In a world in which celebrities come and go like exploding supernovas, the writer has remained a constant. Stephen King, John Grisham, and J. K. Rawling have been stars for decades, with no sign of abatement. Literary giants (Joyce Carol Oates, the late John Updike, Margaret Atwood, Toni Morrison, Philip Roth) continue to be published and be discovered. Perhaps because of this fascination with the creative writer as an individual, the first part of the book (“The Writer”) is also the longest. Jane Piirto tackles the personalities of creative writers. Samaneh Pourjalali, E. M. Skrzynecky, and James C. Kaufman discuss the complex relationship among the creative writer, locus of control, and the tendency to dysphorically ruminate. Ad`ele Kohanyi takes on the related question of how mood variability and regulation affect different writers. Steven R. Pritzker and David McGarva write about eminent screenwriters; indeed, in addition to his accomplishments in psychology, Pritzker is a well-known screenwriter himself and has worked on such television shows as The Mary Tyler Moore Show and Silver Spoons. Finally, Scott Barry Kaufman and Aaron Kozbelt offer insight into the psychological characteristics of comedy writers. In the second part of the book, “The Text,” we begin with a chapter by Daniel Nettle on the evolution of creative writing. Martin S. Lindauer then argues for the importance of physiognomy, in which investigating the text itself can yield insights into a writer’s thought process. Finally, Dean Keith Simonton analyzes the work of perhaps the best-known writer of all time, William Shakespeare. The third part focuses on “The Process.” Todd Lubart takes a delightful look at the creative process through the eyes of a certain young fictional girl named Alice. R. Keith Sawyer, known for his work on group creativity, applies that same lens to writing as a collaborative act. Mark A. Runco takes a broad look at many facets of writing and how these facets interact with many different ideas. Finally, Thomas B. Ward and E. Thomas Lawson offer a treat for science fiction/fantasy fans as they look at the role of creative cognition in this genre. In the fourth part, our scholars focus on “The Development” of both the creative writer and creative writing. Susan K. Perry describes what it is like to write in flow, based on hundreds of interviews with eminent writers. Jerome L. Singer and Michael V. Barrios discuss perhaps the bane of a writer’s existence – writer’s block – and strategies for getting creativity kick-started again. Sandra W. Russ discusses how pretend play and emotional processes can play a role in developing narrative writing. Finally, Janel D. Sexton and James W. Pennebaker share their research on the curative powers of expressive writing (which serves as an alternate perspective to some of the chapters in the first section about creative writing and poor mental health).

Preface

xxi

In the fifth and final part, “The Education,” we shift our focus to the classroom. John Baer and Sharon S. McKool describe two of the top creativity killers, rewards and evaluations, and propose ways to maintain a healthy enjoyment of creative writing. Grace R. Waitman and Jonathan A. Plucker share some of the myths of creativity, arguing that a successful approach to teaching writing could start by shattering some of these myths. Genevieve E. Chandler and Pat Schneider describe the Amherst Writers & Artists method of teaching creative writing, which has been applied to a number of nonartist populations. Finally, Ai-Girl Tan offers a cross-cultural spin on this topic by discussing ways of learning to write creatively in Chinese classrooms. We are honored to have a foreword by Robert J. Sternberg, one of the true visionaries in creativity research and a mentor to both of us, to begin this collection. We have also written a final chapter that integrates and synthesizes the many suggestions and ideas proposed throughout the chapters. We hope that, by bringing together the insights and research of these exemplary psychologists, this book will serve as a resource for many people. Certainly, psychologists who study creativity, writing, and creative writing may be the most obvious audience. But we hope that writers themselves – novelists, poets, playwrights, journalists, essayists, and bloggers – will find much to ponder (and, perhaps, disagree with) in the pages that follow. We also hope that people interested in writing can open the book to any chapter and find a discussion that introduces a new idea to ponder. Scott Barry Kaufman James C. Kaufman

acknowledgments

We would like to first thank our editors at Cambridge who shepherded this project through fruition, Eric Schwartz and Simina Calin. We would also like to thank Jeanie Lee for her tireless and cheerful work on this project; project manager Brigitte Coulton and copyeditor Gail Naron Chalew for a fantastic job; Thomas Neises for his assistance; and a terrific team of indexers led by David Loomis and including Ryan Holt and Anthony Sierra. We appreciate the insight and help of Lori Handelman, Allison Kaufman, Paul Locher, and Genet Tulgetske. We have both been lucky enough to be mentored by Robert J. Sternberg, who graciously wrote the foreword to this book. His support and accomplishments continue to inspire us both. Jerome L. Singer was on both of our doctoral committees, and his imagination, wit, and joy for life are a constant delight. We are continually inspired by our colleagues in the field of creativity research; we are also both especially invigorated by the stellar research and writing of a new generation of creativity scholars such as Ron Beghetto, Zorana Ivcevic, Aaron Kozbelt, and Paul Silvia (among many others). Scott would like to thank his very supportive and wonderful friends: Elliot Paul (his twin brother from another mother, a man with a great mind and a big heart), Dr. Benjamin Irvine of jolly ol’ England (thanks for the many stimulating conversations and fun times!), Eugene Ford, Markus LaBooty, Nienke Venderbosch, Brent Kyle, Jennifer DiMase, Louisa Egan, Candida Moss, Elise Christopher, Alia Crum, Yoona Kang, Adam Green, Bret Logan, Dave Roberts, Hillary Ruhl Due˜nas, Erin Coulter, Justin Khoo, Mark Gerban, Avi Kouzi, Jamie Brown, and Balazs Aczar. He also owes a huge debt of gratitude to his terrific collaborators: James Kaufman (a constant mentor and friend, as well as his other twin brother from another mother), Colin DeYoung, Glenn Geher, Jean Pretz, and Luis Jim´enez. As for his lifelong mentors, warm appreciation goes to Anne Fay and Nicholas Mackintosh for their continual guidance. Thanks to the late Herbert Simon for mentoring and inspiring him as xxiii

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Acknowledgments

an undergraduate and to Jeremy Gray for giving him a home at Yale. Cheers to his high school teachers Mary Acton, Regina Gordon, Tom Elliot, and Debra Hobbs for their fine teaching and warm encouragement and Mr. O for his stimulating and fun creative writing class. And last, but certainly not least, acknowledgments go to his family. Thanks to his grandfather Harry Gorodetzer for showing him the importance of practice and sharing the cello with him (the most beautiful instrument in the world), his grandmother Jeanette Robbins Gorodetzer for the bear hugs, his Bubba for the warmth, and his Zeda for the toys. Scott’s biggest acknowledgment and gratitude go to his parents, Barbara and Michael – thanks for encouraging all of his varied, sometimes zany creative pursuits and writings (remember Roborky’s Statue?). Without their encouragement, love, and guidance, this book would hardly have been possible. James would like to thank his many psychology mentors – those above and John Baer, Jeff and Lisa Smith, and Jonathan Plucker and his CSUSB colleagues (especially Mark Agars, Susan Daniels, Michelle Ebert Freire, and Allen Butt; chair Robert Cramer; and administrators Jean Peacock, Joanna Worthley, Jamal Nassar, Louis Fernandez, and Al Karnig). He would also like to thank his inner circle of friends – especially Nate, Amy, and Zachary Stone; Joshua Butler; and David, Aviva, and Jonah Hecht – and his family – the Bengels clan (especially Dennis and Barbara, Emily, and Jessica); Joseph, Jean, and Cindy Katz; Milissa, Matt, Josiah, and Mikaela Kaufman; Kate Singleton; Nicole Hendrix; Jennie, Mitch, Brianna, and Leo Singer; Alan and Nadeen Kaufman; and his wife, Allison, and son, Jacob.

part i THE WRITER

1 The Personalities of Creative Writers jane piirto

Popular images of male novelists and poets show them professorially clad, in khakis or in tweed sport coats with leather patches on the arms, smoking pipes; or, as in the image of writers like Ernest Hemingway or Jim Harrison, cradling rifles or fly-fishing, wearing horn-rimmed glasses or swaggering beneath cowboy hats: They are writing from the ivory tower or writing from the field of battle. These two disparate images are, as we shall see, somewhat true. And what about the female writer? She is clad in mannish clothes, her hair cut in a butch, braless and strident, living with her male and female lovers in the Bohemian garrets of a large city; or she is whimsically virginal and intense, her long, tangled and flowing hair entwined with rosettes of wild flowers just picked, sitting in a meadow, her long delicate fingers slowly turning the pages of a leather-bound book with a ribbon for a marker. As we shall see, the personalities these images imply are also somewhat true. Creative people are those who do creative acts. The creativity occurs in the becoming, the making. In the struggle to be creative, personality attributes are extremely important. Creative people seem to have certain core personality attributes. I have made personality attributes the base of my Piirto Piiramid of Talent Development (see Figure 1.1). Many studies have emphasized that successful creators in all domains have certain personality attributes in common (cf. Feist, 1999). These attributes make up the base of the model and rest on the foundation of genes. Among these are the following: androgyny (Barron, 1968a; Csikszentmihalyi, Rathunde, & Whalen, 1993; Piirto & Fraas, 1995; Piirto & Johnson, 2004); creativity (Renzulli, 1978; Tannenbaum, 1983); imagination (Dewey, 1934; Langer, 1957; Plato, 1952; Prescott, 1920; Santayana, 1896); insight (Runco, 2006; Sternberg & Davidson, 1995); intuition (Barron, 1968a, 1968b, 1995; Myers & McCaulley, 1985; Piirto & Johnson, 2004); introversion (Cross, Speirs Neumeister, & Cassady, 2007; Myers & McCaulley, 1985; Piirto & Johnson, 2004; Simonton, 1999); naivet´e, or openness to experience (Cattell, 1971, 1990; Ghiselin, 1952); overexcitabilities (Dabrowski, 1965; Piechowski, 2006, Piirto, Montgomery, & 3

4

Jane Piirto 5. The Environmental Aspect— the 5 “suns”

Sun of School

Sun of Home

Sun of Community & Culture

***The Talent Becomes a “Calling,” or “Thorn” ***

Sun of Chance

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fic T alen imu ts m In telle Com c t p ual eten Drive ce P Min

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es

ALIT

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** h Mat e c Dan l ia Soc tion n e Inv emics d Aca anics h Mec ess in . Bus al etc u it ir Sp

Sun of Gender

4. The Aspect of Talent in Domains

** ain* 3. The Cognitive Aspect Dom g n o in ain i t c un m 2. The Emotional for F sen Do ho xcitAspect: in C vere

In a

O ities abil nsities) n I ( te ctual e tion Voli ctionism Intell tional l a e f Emo ination Per nce g ilie Ima ual r s Res gyny n Se homoto ro c And tence Psy is s Per

S

UTE

IB TTR

A

Personality

es Gen 1. The Genetic Aspect

Figure 1.1. The Piirto Piiramid of Talent Development. ©Jane Piirto, 1993. All rights reserved.

May, 2008); motivation, or passion for work in a domain (Barron, 1968a, 1995; Bloom, 1985); perceptiveness (Myers & McCaulley 1985); persistence (Rayneri, Gerber, & Wiley, 2003; Renzulli, 1978); preference for complexity (Barron, 1995); resilience (Block & Kremen, 1996; Jenkins-Friedman, 1992; Renzulli 1978); risk taking (MacKinnon, 1978; Torrance, 1987); self-discipline (Piirto, 2004); self-efficacy (Sternberg & Lubart, 1992; Zimmerman, Bandura, & Martinez-Pons 1992); tolerance for ambiguity (Barron, 1968a, 1995); and volition, or will (Corno & Kanfer, 1993; Simonton, 1999). This list is by no means discrete or complete, but shows that creative adults achieve effectiveness partially by force of personality. Talented adults who achieve success possess many of these attributes. Personality is an area in which there are many competing theories. Personality theory can be psychoanalytic (ego psychology, object relations,

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transpersonalism); behavioral or cognitive (quantitative studies using factor analysis such as those of Cattell [1990] and Eysenck [1993]); or humanistic (using phenomenology, existentialism, Gestalt, humanistic, and transpersonal theories). Personality is sometimes equated with character and seen as directing how one lives one’s life. The personality attributes mentioned here have been determined by empirical studies of creative producers, mostly adults, but in some cases, adolescents in special schools and programs were studied. Some research has indicated an evolutionary cause of personality preferences (Feist, 2007). Many studies of personality attributes have used the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator, based on the Jungian theory of personality. The Cattell 16 Personality Factors, the Eysenck Inventory, the Gough Creative Personality Inventory, the California Psychological Inventory, the Minnesota Multiphasic Psychological Inventory, and others have also been used in studies cited here. The consolidation of personality traits into the Big Five through factor analysis (Costa & McCrae, 1992; McCrae & Costa, 1999) is noted here, but earlier work on creative people has noted these other traits listed earlier, and so I include the others as well. These were analyzed through what is called the “lexical tradition” (Costa & McCrae, 1992, p. 14) by researchers such as Cattell (1971). The Revised NEO Personality Inventory (NEO-PI-R) combines factors into facets and then into five domains: Neuroticism (N), Extraversion (E), Openness (O), Agreeableness (A), and Conscientiousness (C). It seems that the domain of openness to experience (O) includes creative attributes: Fantasy (O1), Aesthetics (O2), Feelings (O3), Actions (O4), Ideas (O5), and Values (O6). “Open individuals are unconventional, willing to question authority, and prepared to entertain new ethical, social, and political ideas” (Costa & McCrae, 1992, p. 15). However, other personality attributes on this instrument may also apply to writers; for example, Tender-Mindedness (A6), and, in the case of writers, Depression (N3). This is just speculation, and no known data exist on writers who have been assessed with this instrument; that is research yet to be conducted. The creative writer can be considered to have these generic personality attributes found in creators, as well as others. This chapter discusses the personality attributes that writers seem to show. Those attributes on the base of the Piirto Piiramid of Talent Development referred to earlier, those that are generic, and those that also seem to appear in creative writers have been discussed in Chapter 2 of Piirto (2002) and are not discussed further here. Numerous studies have come from the Institute for Personality Assessment and Research (IPAR), which was established after World War II at the University of California in Berkeley. MacKinnon (1978) directed IPAR, after serving on the assessment staff of the Office of Special Services, the forerunner of the CIA. In 1949 the Rockefeller Foundation, Carnegie Corporation, and Ford Foundation granted funds to start IPAR for the purpose of determining which people were most highly effective and what made them that way (Barron, 1963). Among the people studied were writers, architects, engineering

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students, women mathematicians, inventors, and research scientists. The people studied were chosen by peer nomination; that is, the nominators were college professors, professionals in the field, and respected experts or connoisseurs knowledgeable about the field. Among the researchers there were Frank Barron, Donald MacKinnon, Harrison Gough, Ravenna Helson, Donald Crutchfield, and Erik Erikson (Helson, 1999). At IPAR, Frank Barron and his colleagues asked literature and drama professors at the University of California for the names of the most creative among outstanding creative writers then writing (Barron, 1968a, 1968b, 1969, 1972, 1995). They came up with a list of 56 writers, who were invited to come to the University of California to participate in extensive testing and interviewing. These studies pioneered some of the tests and interview techniques still used in studying human personality attributes and characteristics; for example, the Q-sort method of interviewing and the Barron-Welsh Art Scale for evaluating works of art. Some of the writers who came to campus were Truman Capote, Frank O’Connor, Muriel Rukeyser, William Carlos Williams, MacKinlay Kantor, Jessamyn West, A. B. Guthrie Jr., Andrew Lytle, Robert Duncan, Bill Mauldin, and Kenneth Rexroth. Tests and interviews were conducted off campus with such writers as Norman Mailer, W. H. Auden, Marianne Moore, Michael McClure, Arthur Koestler, and Sean O’Faolain. Also among these writers who came to be tested was Saul Bellow, who told George Garrett about being paid $10,000 to go to Berkeley and take psychological tests. Bellow said, “They had Capote there, too – and what they ended up with was the feeling that writers had more willpower. . . . And if that’s all, it doesn’t tell you anything, except maybe that discipline helps” (quoted in Neubauer, 1994, p. 120). Barron (1995), in describing this testing, wrote, “It was a painful and taxing responsibility to ask these writers, many of whom had suffered much in their own creative lives, to probe deeply into themselves and to answer the questions . . . seemingly irrelevant and unworthy questions” (p. 183). The IPAR studies were seminal in the research on writers. WHAT PERSONALITY TESTS SHOW

There also exists information on the personalities of creative writers from personality tests developed by psychologists and psychoanalysts. Two of my own small studies using the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI) and the Overexcitabilities Questionnaire (OEQ) are discussed here (Piirto, 1978, 1995, 1998b). The Myers-Briggs Type Indicator The Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI) has been used to determine the Jungian-based type preferences of many occupational groups, including scientists, artists, laborers, writers, and counselors. Creativity studies done using

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the MBTI were done in conjunction with the other studies done at IPAR. Many writers preferred the N (Intuitive) and the P (Perceptive). I administered the MBTI to a group of 15 successful women writers and to a comparison group of 15 female elementary school teachers. Two strong patterns emerged. In agreement with the IPAR data, most of the writers preferred Intuition (N) and Perception (P). As Myers and McCaulley said, “Data from the world is received in ways that go beyond the senses and that they preferred to see patterns, relationships, and meaning in all they perceive” (1985, p. 135). Seventy-five percent of the women writers preferred the NF (Intuition Feeling or NT (Intuition Thinking) combination, in contrast to only 20% of the comparison group of elementary school teachers. Instead, like most elementary teachers, the comparison group of teachers preferred the SF combination (Sensing and Feeling; Piirto, 1998c). Women in the general population are more likely to prefer Feeling than Thinking, and that is why the instrument itself has separate templates for males and females when scoring those preferences (also see Myers & McCaulley, 1985); this was true for the comparison group as well as for the women writers. My research confirms what was found by Barron (1968a), who indicated that the writers he studied also preferred Feeling and Intuition: The writers were “distinctly more introverted than extraverted, more feeling than thinking, and more intuitive than oriented to sense experience” (pp. 237, 245). Since the IPAR study included more men than women writers, the results here show that there seem to be no great gender differences in personality type preferences, indicating that the “sun” of gender may be environmental, as postulated in my Piiramid of Talent Development (see Figure 1.1). Overexcitability Questionnaire (OEQ) I also published (Piirto, 2002; Piirto, in press) the transcripts of the OEQ for three male writers: a poet, a prose writer, and a playwright. The scores on these questionnaires indicated they had the highest levels of imaginational, intellectual, and emotional overexcitability. PERSONALITY ATTRIBUTES OF WRITERS

This section discusses the following personality attributes of writers that may or may not be present in other creative people who practice their creativity in other fields or domains: (1) ambition/envy, (2) concern with philosophical matters, (3) frankness often expressed in political or social activism, (4) psychopathology, (5) depression, (6) empathy, and (7) a sense of humor. Examples are taken from anecdotes from the lives of writers. The methodology was qualitative, and the material comes from published interviews, memoirs, and biographies. Much of this was first published in Piirto (2002). The criterion

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for a writer being included as an example was that he or she would or does qualify for listing in the Directory of American Poets and Writers (www.pw .org/directory/), which has a very high standard for inclusion. A writer needs to earn 12 points to be listed, with the points given as follows: each book of poetry, fiction, or creative nonfiction (personal essays or memoirs) = 12 points; each chapbook = 6 points; each work of fiction or creative nonfiction (personal essays or memoirs) published in a literary journal, anthology, or edited Web publication = 3 points; and each poem published in a literary journal, anthology, or edited Web publication = 2 points. Currently, only about 7,355 writers are listed, of whom about 4,000 are poets, 1,900 are fiction writers, 100 are performance writers, and the remainder (about 1,100) are listed as both poets and writers. Many studies of creative writers have not used such a standard, but may use self-description rather than peer review and literary publication record. I am a participant-observer in this regard, as I am listed as both a poet and a writer (e.g., see Piirto, 1985, 1995) in this Directory. Ambition/Envy Ambition and its doppelganger, envy, are not unknown among writers. For example, the writer T. Coraghessan Boyle said he wanted to be “the most famous writer alive and the greatest writer ever” (Friend, 1990, pp. 60–68). Other writers who, like Boyle, have studied at the famous Iowa Writers’ Workshop have also asserted this ambition. The writer Jane Smiley, then a recent graduate of the University of Iowa with a PhD in medieval literature, told me the same thing late one August night in a darkened van on our way to the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference in 1977 when we were confessing our dreams and hopes. She has since gone on to win both the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize, steadily increasing her fame and writing with extreme discipline and passion. Writers need ambition, as do other creative producers, but that ambition often produces horrible feelings of inadequacy and anxiety. This may be because of the intimate subject matter of the creative writer – the self or the self, coded. The high rate of rejection that creative writers experience when they try to publish their work may also contribute to the intense feelings of envy paired with intense ambition. Poet Molly Peacock made no apology for her ambition: From when I was a little girl I wanted to be an artist, and I said to myself, “Somehow I’m getting out of Buffalo, New York.” I had a drive to get out of that house and that town. That takes ambition, and my ambition is located in that very early desire to succeed. Of course, you can’t be published in The New Yorker without a drive to succeed. But also you can’t be published in issue one, volume one, of a brand new, teeny-tiny

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literary enterprise without a similar hunger for success. . . . Ambition is a fact of anyone’s life who aspires to anything. (Friman & Templin, 1994, p. 41)

Coleridge, in the 19th century, also experienced the envy of other writers, indicating that this is not a new phenomenon. In describing the reception of his poem, “Christabel,” he said, “Three years ago I did not know or believe that I had no enemy in the world: and now even my strongest sensations of gratitude are mingled with fear, and I . . . ask – Have I one friend?” (Coleridge, 1872, p. 680). He described that he was begged to recite the work at many social gatherings and urged to publish it. “Since then, with very few exceptions, I have heard nothing but abuse, and this too in a spirit of bitterness.” The shadow side of the drive and resilience it takes to continue in the creative writing profession is the envy that one feels at the success of others. Envy can paralyze, but it can also serve to motivate. Friedman (1994) called envy “the writer’s disease” (p. 5). She wrote, “It’s desire that causes envy. Isn’t desire the villain here? Yet how to be an artist without desire.” Writers project that other writers are happy, successful, famous, and admired, and in so doing they give part of themselves away to the power of the extrinsic. How much praise and adulation is enough? Louis Simpson (1972) noted that friendships between writers do not seem to have longevity: “They become resentful of criticism and think that the other person is trying to do them in, or they become jealous of his success” (p. 175). Cynthia Ozick in her Paris Review interview described how she thought she would be Henry James by the age of 25, and then when that did not happen, she began to take note of those who were getting famous. Envy began to cut into her soul (Teicholz, 1989). She even wrote a short story called “Envy” (Ozick, 1971) in which a Yiddish writer is consumed by envy of the achievements of other writers who are able to write in English. Other causes for envy exist. Many well-known writers teach at universities. Poet Jean Valentine described being so envious of her talented students that she quit teaching: “My students would come in with these wonderful poems, and I was jealous. I wasn’t writing anything” (Bland, 2004, p. 51). Another cause of envy comes from wondering about one’s legacy as a writer. Hemingway was famous for his jealousy of his contemporaries, but he also had a need to triumph over his predecessors: In Lynn’s biography (1988), he is quoted as saying, “I started out very quiet and I beat Mr. Turgenev. Then I trained hard and I beat Mr. de Maupassant. I’ve fought two draws with Mr. Stendahl. . . . But nobody’s going to get me in any ring with Mr. Tolstoy unless I’m crazy or I keep getting better” (p. 549). The rivalry and off-again, on-again friendship between poets James Dickey and Robert Bly during the 1960s led to a series of public statements about each other’s patriotism during the protests about the

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Vietnam War, but their friendship had always been fraught with envy as one and then the other ascended on the college reading circuit of the 1960s and 1970s (Hart, 2000). Both went on to popular success, Dickey with Deliverance, Bly with Iron John, but their differences remained. Concern with Philosophical Issues: Aesthetics and Ethics Ethically and morally, many writers seem to be concerned with the meaning of life and with the search for truth and beauty. They seem particularly concerned about behaving in an ethically consistent fashion. Supposedly this is the lofty purpose of literature, and that writers search for truth and beauty is not surprising. From Shelley’s assertion of “beauty is truth, truth beauty,” the purpose of literature has been put forth as a way to morally explicate and uphold human values. Three examples follow. Poet Octavio Paz said, “Ever since I was an adolescent I’ve been intrigued with the mystery of freedom” (MacAdam, 1991, p. 103). This search for truth begins young. Yeats described himself at art school in London this way: “I was constantly troubled about philosophic questions” (Yeats, 1953, p. 53). He would tell his friends that the purpose of poetry and sculpture was to “keep our passions alive,” and his friends would say that people would be better off without passions. He spent a week worrying about this problem: “Do the arts make us happier, or more sensitive and therefore more unhappy?” When he talked about these concerns to his friends, they would treat him with wry and paternalistic irony. Writer Joan Didion said, “I can recall disapproving of the golden mean, always thinking there was more to be learned from the dark journey. The dark journey engages me more” (Kuehl, 1978, p. 335). In creative writing, the philosophical concern with the meaning of life is melded with the psychological concern with what makes human beings tick, and the two are explicated through dramatis personae in story or through the metaphors and images in verse. Material displaying the writer’s concern with ethical, moral, and aesthetic matters is abundant. These were but a few examples. Frankness that Is Often Expressed in Political or Social Activism Writers attract the interest of others, probably because of their ability to say what they think. The Barron study (1968a, 1995) found through psychological testing and interviews that the writers were frank and needed to communicate their political views and were likely to take risks in doing so. Throughout history, the politics of writers seems to have been tended toward the pacifist, liberal, or left wing, no matter what era’s issues they were reacting to. For example, 1991 National Book Award winner Norman Rush, a war resister to

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the Korean War, spent time in jail in the early 1950s where he wrote a novel that he hoped would be the beginning of a new genre, the “nonviolent thriller” (Rush, 1995, p. 219). The writer may value freedom of expression more than the feelings of others. Writers throughout the world have often been the first to be thrown into jail or sent into exile for what they have written and said. The Russian writers Alexander Solzhenitsyn and Joseph Brodsky were sent to Siberia for what they wrote. The British writer Salman Rushdie was sentenced to death by the Ayatollah of Iran for his novel Satanic Verses and had to go into hiding in 1989, not emerging until 1998 when the political situation in Iran changed. The writers’ organization, PEN, has a Freedom to Write Committee, which has a subcommittee called Writers in Prison, a watchdog group concerned about writers throughout the world who are persecuted for expressing themselves. Many of the “prisoners of conscience” throughout the world are writers. Writers Lillian Hellman and Dashiell Hammett, who were among those writers called before the House Un-American Activities Committee as suspected communist activists in the early 1950s, established grants administered through Human Rights Watch “to assist writers throughout the world who have been victims of political persecution.” The organization publishes Action Alerts about writers who are detained. For example, the alert for June 2007 concerned the Russian journalist Vladimir Chugunov, who was captured by police and put into a psychiatric institution. Most writers seem to be leftist or liberal. Nobel Prize winning Chilean poet and politician Pablo Neruda is an example of a writer exiled for his socialist convictions expressed in poems and essays. The award-winning movie Il Postino (1994) was a dramatic explication of the impact Neruda’s poems and political beliefs had on a simple island man who delivered Neruda’s mail while he was in exile in the early 1950s. Poets Robert Bly, Allen Ginsberg, Denise Levertov, Ted Berrigan, and others were leaders of the Vietnam antiwar movement in the United States, and Ginsberg tried to levitate the Pentagon at one notable protest meeting. At a less lofty level, young creative writers often publish frank underground newspapers that are the bane of their teachers and school administrators. “I was just telling the truth,” they often say, surprised at the reactions of the authorities to their writing. There is, though, a little diversity among writers in political and class beliefs. For example, the National Book Award nominee Mark Helprin is a senior fellow at the conservative Hudson Institute and was a speechwriter for Bob Dole in the 1996 presidential campaign. Helprin suggested that his minority status among writers (as a conservative Republican) has led to some censorship by bookstores and reading groups: “I’ve heard reports of bookstores that won’t sell my books” (Schapiro, 1999). Writer John Irving and poet James Dickey were also rumored to be conservatives. Poet Howard McCord is a card-carrying member of the National Rifle Association.

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Environmental activism expressed in frank remonstrance to polluters is also common among writers. The environmental concerns of such poets as Gary Snyder (2007), and Wendell Berry (2005) have gained much attention. Writer and poet Julia Butterfly Hill climbed a 1,000-year-old redwood tree in Humboldt, California, lived in its branches for 2 years, and wrote a memoir (Hill, 2001). She agreed to write the memoir only if the paper used was recycled and processed without bleach. She and other writers founded the Green Press Initiative, which advocates environmentally friendly printing and publishing practices. In looking at published interviews, memoirs, and the like of contemporary writers, one often sees the frankness and social activism in the writers’ assertions. Novelist Russell Banks stated that a writer must deal truthfully with what he sees: “One of the things I believe is that if you are a member of a society or culture that is racist and sexist – as ours is – and you don’t offer an ongoing critique of that as part of your daily life, then you’re inevitably going to end up participating in it” (Joyce, 1998). Norman Dubie, who grew up the son of a minister and a nurse, tried not to write political poems, but poems of witness. A Buddhist, he stopped writing in order to sit and meditate for 10 years, but he had to return to speaking. In 2004, he voiced this fear: I’m completely dismayed with the Bush administration and all the complicated ways in which the lives of real people are being ruined now and clearly, deep into the future. . . . God save us, he may get four more years, but I fear that terribly. If they get four more years, I think they’ll try to reverse Roe v. Wade, and then all of our daughters are going to [take to] the streets. And all of a sudden, all those ungodly provisions of the Patriot Act are going to be used on our own children. (Gannon, 2004, p. 38)

Psychopathology Some creative writers may be mad as well as angry. The personality tests that Barron (1963, 1968a, 1995) gave to the writers indicated that they showed many of the characteristics of manic-depressives and schizophrenics, but that their ego strength and intelligence were higher than the manic-depressives and schizophrenics. Creative writers were “markedly deviant” from the regular population, and the distinguished writers seemed to have tendencies to be schizoid, depressive, hysterical, or psychopathic and not to have rigid sex role expectations. Barron reported, “The writers appear to be both sicker and healthier psychologically than people in general. . . . The face they turn to the world is sometimes one of pain, often of protest, sometimes of distance and withdrawal, and certainly they are emotional” (Barron, 1968a, p. 244). Jamison (1989), in a study of 39 British writers and 8 artists, found that 38% had been treated for affective illness, which is defined in the Oxford English Dictionary as “a condition (e.g., depression, mania) that affects the

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mood,” whereas in the normal population less than 5% of people are treated for affective illness. The writers and artists also reported mental problems, including hospitalization, in their first-degree relatives to a greater extent than in the normal population Jamison said that psychiatrists should be cautious in their diagnoses and prescriptions of drugs as states of creativity are similar to those reported by people with mood disorders. The side effects of commonly prescribed drugs may damage the creative process. Several of the writers (17%) stopped taking lithium because of its deadening effects on their creative thinking. Andreason (1987; Andreason & Canter, 1974) studied 27 male and 3 female faculty at the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop over a period of 15 years. She compared them with a group of hospital administrators, lawyers, social workers, and the like. The average age of both groups was 37 years. Bipolar manic-depressive affective disorder was found in 80% of the writers and in 30% of the comparison group, which itself had a higher than usual incidence of affective disorder. Two-thirds of the writers had sought psychiatric help. Two of the 30 writers committed suicide during the 15 years of the study. The verbal intelligence of the faculty members was no higher than that of the comparison group, about 125. Andreason (1987) also studied the first-degree relatives of the writers and found that almost half also had occupations that emphasized creativity, such as teaching music or dance, though they may not have been in the writing field. This finding indicates that there may be a general creativity factor that is genetically transmitted. Andreason had expected to find a higher incidence of schizophrenia among the writers, but instead she found manic-depression. The writers said they wrote during the long periods between episodes, rather than during the highs and lows characteristic of bipolar disorder. She noted, “Affective disorder may be both a ‘hereditary taint’ and a hereditary gift” (1987, p. 1292). As an example, the poet Allen Ginsberg and his mother both experienced mental disorder. Early in his career, Ginsberg, suffering extreme self-doubt and almost arrested for burglary, checked himself into the New York Psychiatric Institute. (Incidentally, tests given at this time showed Ginsberg’s IQ to be “near genius level,” according to Miles, 1989.) Ginsberg’s childhood in New Jersey had been odd, to say the least. His mother was a paranoid schizophrenic who was often institutionalized; Allen himself had to take her to the institution once. At home, she liked to be “natural,” often striding around the house in the nude. Ginsberg’s father was the well-known poet Louis Ginsberg, a teacher who tried to keep life somewhat normal for Allen and his brother. Ginsberg’s moving 1961 poem “Kaddish” is an artistic revelation of his family’s trials, an anguished expression of regret that when his mother died, insane in a mental hospital, they were not able to summon 10 Jewish men needed to say the Jewish prayer for the dead, the Kaddish (Ginsberg, 1984).

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Psychoanalysts and psychologists have often stated that writers write because of deep-seated pathologies. From Sigmund Freud (1908/1976), who said that writers use their personal childhood fantasies; to E. Kris (1976) who said that writers write because of “regression in service of the ego”; to Albert Rothenberg (1990), who spoke of a Janusian two-faced process of creativity (in which he used case material from his psychiatric patients who were writers); to Jamison (1993), who detailed the family history of bipolar illness in writers; to Kaufman and Baer (2002), who noted that female poets were the most at risk for mental illness because of their inability to ignore the results of rejection and because writing poetry may exacerbate rather than heal mental problems, psychologists and psychiatrists have analyzed writers, searching for the “key” that will unlock the mystery of their creativity. Kaufman (2001) called it the “Sylvia Plath effect,” evoking the tragic suicide of poet and novelist Sylvia Plath, wife of poet Ted Hughes, who later became British Poet Laureate. Hughes also suffered from depression, but did not attempt suicide, although the next woman in his life, Assia Wevill, also a writer, committed suicide and also killed their (probable) daughter (Feinstein, 2001). The psychologist Leo Schneiderman (1988) suggested that William Faulkner wrote because of ego defects, including low self-esteem caused by an overprotective mother and a rejecting father; Lillian Hellman wrote out of narcissistic “chronic rage” that resulted from “material deprivation” (p. 42); Tennessee Williams wrote to compensate for his incestuous feelings toward his mother and sister; Flannery O’Connor wrote out of guilt for getting ill with lupus in her late twenties and being dependent on her mother during adulthood; John Cheever wrote because of the “early withdrawal of parental empathy” (p. 124); Vladimir Nabokov wrote out of a longing for his presexual days; Jorge Luis Borges wrote because of oncoming blindness and his shame after a series of crises in his family’s fortunes in Buenos Aires; Samuel Beckett wrote out of a “character disorder marked by extreme rigidity and self-centeredness” (p. 163); and the playwright Harold Pinter wrote out of “regression to a past that was as emotionally deprived as is the present” (p. 205). Schneiderman concluded, “Great literary art is a synthesis of technical skill with tremendous fear, rage, or other powerful emotions, and . . . the fundamental character of great writers reveals significant failure along developmental lines, that is, a basic lack of maturity” (Schneiderman, 1988, p. 207). Jamison (1993) made a diagram of the genealogies and documented manic-depressive illness in the first-degree relatives of these writers: Alfred Lord Tennyson; Henry, Alice, and William James; Herman Melville; Samuel Taylor Coleridge; Virginia Woolf; Ernest Hemingway; and Mary Wollstonecraft and her daughter Mary Shelley. Hans Christian Andersen, Honor´e de Balzac, James Barrie, James Boswell, John Bunyan, Mark Twain, Joseph Conrad, Charles Dickens, Isak Dinesen, Ralph Waldo Emerson, William Faulkner, F. Scott Fitzerald, Nikolai Gogol, Maxim Gorky, Kenneth Grahame, Ernest Hemingway, Hermann Hesse, Henrik Ibsen, William Inge, Henry James,

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William James, Charles Lamb, Malcolm Lowry, Antonin Artaud, Charles Baudelaire, John Berryman, William Blake, Louise Bogan, Rupert Brooke, Robert Burns, George Gordon, Lord Byron, Paul Celan, Thomas Chatterton, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, William Collins, William Cowper, Hart Crane, Emily Dickinson, T. S. Eliot, Anne Finch, Oliver Goldsmith, Thomas Gray, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Randall Jarrell, and many others. Poets were especially struck with such illness. She found family illness in many of these writers and poets, but not all of them. And, of course, given the times, the diagnoses could not have been made for all of them. Depression Forget full-blown psychopathology. How about good, old-fashioned depression that is perhaps not of the bipolar type? Examples of depression in creative writers abound, as witness the myriads of memoirs now being written that detail depression’s effects. Burroughs (2002, 2003) traced his poet mother’s depressions and, in further works, his own, along with his struggles with alcoholism. A 2006 movie based on his first memoir, Running with Scissors, featured Annette Bening uncannily channeling the poet mother. Evocative titles such as Where the Roots Reach the Water (Smith, 1999) and In the Jaws of the Black Dog (Mays, 1995) speak to the eloquence with which depressed writers try to describe their pain. I took a workshop from Smith in 1999, in which he described his attempts, while getting an MFA at the University of Montana, to function as a social caseworker. Writing creatively was impossible. An anthology on the topic of depression among writers has been published (Casey, 2002) that features excerpts from creative writers’ works on the topic. One was from the book by Styron (1990), Darkness Visible. Styron recalled that he had fallen into deep depression after stopping drinking in his early sixties: “The depression that engulfed me was not of the manic type – the one accompanied by euphoric highs. . . . I was sixty when the illness struck for the first time, in the ‘unipolar’ form.” He said that the alcohol had served as a “shield against anxiety” and without it, “the shadows of nightfall seemed more somber, my mornings were less buoyant, walks in the woods became less zestful,” and he experienced “visceral queasiness” while writing during the late afternoons (pp. 38, 62). He sought psychiatric help and was hospitalized and subsequently overmedicated. Noting that other writers and artists had suffered from debilitating depression, including Albert Camus, Romain Gary, Jean Seberg, Randall Jarrell, Hart Crane, van Gogh, Virginia Woolf, Mark Rothko, Diane Arbus, William Inge, and the humorist Art Buchwald, Styron (1990) commented that depression yields no faith in ultimate rescue: “The pain is unrelenting, and what makes the condition intolerable is the foreknowledge that no remedy will come – not in a day, an hour, a month, or a minute” (p. 36). Styron called those artists and writers “doomed and splendidly creative men and women” who had childhood

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experiences where the depression took root. “Could any of them have had a hint, then, of the psyche’s perishability, its exquisite fragility? And why were they destroyed, while others – similarly stricken – struggled through?” (p. 36). Novelist Amy Tan spoke of the depression she suffered and the suicides in her family. She said in a 1995 interview, “Some of it is probably biochemical, but I think it’s also in my family tree. I mean, my grandmother killed herself; she certainly had depression in her life.” This became one of the themes of Tan’s novel, The Joy Luck Club. Tan said, “And anyone, like my mother, who witnessed her own mother killing herself, is going to be prone to the same disease.” Tan’s father and brother both died of brain tumors, her father when she was 14 years old. Yet Tan said, “I didn’t do anything about it for a long time, because, like many people, I worried about altering my psyche with drugs. As a writer, I was especially concerned with that. A lot of writers believe that the trauma and the angst that you feel is an essential part of the craft” (“The Spirit Within,” 1995). John Cheever (1991) struggled with alcohol and depression also and wrote in his diaries (published posthumously) that he had to continually try to tell himself that, for a person with his temperament, writing was not “a selfdestructive vocation.” Although writing had given him “money and renown,” he thought that his drinking might have something to do with his writing: “The excitement of alcohol and the excitement of fantasy are very similar” (p. 52). In fact, the presence of alcohol and depression is so commonplace in the biographical information about prominent creative writers that it is odd to find an account where these two are not linked and present (Piirto, 2002; Waldron, 1989). The association is not new; teetotaler Upton Sinclair wrote an account of this phenomenon in 1956. The sad end of suicide resulting from depression or psychopathology is a reality for many writers. Who can understand another’s suicide? A person may have seemed to be on top of the world and then friends and relations make a grisly discovery of the corpse, and the people are left behind to ask why. Highly verbal, highly conceptual, highly opinionated, often nonconforming, frank, and highly driven, writers are prone to self-abusive and self-destructive behavior even as they are enriching the lives of their readers. But this is not always the case, and there are writers whose lives are not lived so tragically or who have, as Styron said, “struggled through.” The high incidence of depression would seem to be an indication of the intense sensitivity with which creative people apprehend the world. It is as if the senses were tuned louder, stronger, and higher, and so the task becomes to communicate the experience of both pain and joy. Empathy The diaries of Dutch writer Etta Hillesum from 1941 to 1942 (published in English in 1985) are illustrative of the empathy that writers, indeed any artists,

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seem to feel for others’ struggles; perhaps this deep empathy contributes to the deep depressions. She said that writers often feel for the rest of the world; they take on the troubles of the rest of the world. Hillsesum said she thought she understood why creative artists and writers become lost in drink, for one must have a strong sense of self not to go under morally, not to lose a sense of direction: “All my tenderness, all my emotions, this whole swirling soul-lake, soul-sea, soul-ocean . . . wants to pour out then, to be allowed to flow forth into just one short poem.” At times like these she felt like “flinging myself headlong into an abyss, losing myself in drink” (Hillesum, 1985, p. 94). Each time she wrote something, she felt empty and apt to fall: “I sense it inside me; even in my most fruitful and most creative inner moments, there are raging demons and self-destructive forces.” Novelist Allan Gurganus spent much time nursing sick friends during the height of the AIDS epidemic. He was later asked to give many eulogies at their funerals. Using his sense of empathy, he reconstructed the good times of their lives for their living friends and relatives. He said, “What I found, in getting up in these little churches and fellowship halls, some in the South and Midwest, was that the more honest I was about the faults of the dead person, and the peccadilloes and the outrageous things, and the extreme opinionatedness of these people, the more laughs I got.” People at the services began to feel better as they remembered their dead friends or relatives. “And the more laughs I got, the better people felt and the more present the missing person became in the spirit dimension and hovering over our heads. And the greater service I had done to them in terms of portraiture and to the people who gathered to remember them” (Garner, 1997). Gurganus later wrote a novel in which he tried to show the devastation of the AIDS epidemic so clearly that both gay and straight people could empathize. A Sense of Humor The intelligence to see what is incongruous, the wit to convey it, the presence of mind to not overdo punning, the irony to set aside tragedy by seeing its funny side, the farcical rolling of eyes and the tongue-biting snatching away of the perfect bon mots in mixed company – all bespeak the sense of humor present in writers. The ever-aware writer sees the humor in melodrama, the humor in making sly titles, the humor in sentimentality, and all keenly. Discrepant events draw the sharp mind and a humorist is born. For example, several writers, including John Ciardi, Isaac Asimov, and a few others, had a group that exchanged off-color limericks in the mail for years (John Ciardi, personal communication, July 1976). These intellectually gifted and creative people shared a love of humor – but a certain type of humor, primarily verbal. Sly humor, wry humor, off-color humor, colorful humor, team-written humor, satire, parody, and comedy are often made up by writers, written down by writers, and transmitted verbally in speech.

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Humorist Calvin Trillin said, “I actually think of being funny as an odd turn of mind, like a mild disability, some weird way of looking at the world that you can’t get rid of” (Plimpton, 1995b, p. 164). Humorist Woody Allen said, “I think if you have a comic perspective, almost anything that happens you tend to put through a comic filter” (Kakutani, 1995, p. 203). According to Garrison Keillor, humor makes a serious point: “Humor has to take up absolutely everything in your life and deal with it. . . . It’s about our lives in America today, the ends of our lives, and everything that happened before and after (Plimpton, 1995a, p. 127). These three writers known for their humor display a serious purpose in their work and demonstrate that humor is used by writers to make points about the follies and foibles of all of us. A case could be made that most writers, whether or not they are humorists, possess verbal wit. Perhaps they hide behind it and become class clowns or persons whose introversion is overcome by punning in public or by slipping into sarcasm, parody, or irony to be accepted in a crowd. Punning, in my experience, seems to be mostly a habit of speech practiced by bright male introverts. The image of the writer as humorist must take into account that many humorists are not known as sweet, nice, easygoing people, but are often rude, crotchety, and acidic. Wallace Stevens, in trying to overcome his introversion and wanting to be accepted through people’s laughter, turned to writing drawing-room comedies in his early twenties. He never finished these plays, and his biographer commented that Stevens transformed “his youthful proclivity for parody into its more hardened form of irony. . . . As a comedian he was in control” (Richardson, 1986, p. 164). In summary, creative writers show personality attributes that are similar to creators in other domains, but they also may have other attributes that are more evident than in other creators. The recent emphasis on creativity in domains, as evidenced by Kaufman and Baer’s (2005) recent anthology, should further explicate the difference among creators. My own work has featured these differences, in my textbooks and in my research (Piirto, 1992, 1994, 1998a, 1999b, 2006). And I am glad to have these comrades in this endeavor.

references Andreason, N. (1987). Creativity and mental illness: Prevalence rates in writers and their first-degree relatives. American Journal of Psychiatry, 144, 1288–1292. Andreason, N., & Canter, A. (1974). The creative writer: Psychiatric symptoms and family history. Comprehensive Psychiatry, 15, 123–131. Barron, F. (1958). The psychology of imagination. Scientific American, 50, 156–165. Barron, F. (1963). Creativity and psychological health: Origins of personal vitality and creative freedom. Princeton, NJ: D. Van Nostrand. Barron, F. (1968a). Creativity and personal freedom. Princeton, NJ: D. Van Nostrand. Barron, F. (1968b). The dream of art and poetry. Psychology Today, 2, 18–23, 66.

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Barron, F. (1969). The psychology of the creative writer. Explorations in Creativity, 43(12), 69–74. Barron, F. (1972). The creative personality: Akin to madness. Psychology Today, 6, 42–44, 84–85. Barron, F. (1995). No rootless flower: An ecology of creativity. Cresskill, NJ: Hampton Press. Berry, W. (2005). A way of ignorance: Essays. Emeryville, CA: Avalon Publishing. Bland, C. (2004). The world as her own: A profile of Jean Valentine. Poets & Writers Magazine, 32(6), 48–53. Block, J., & Kremen, A. M. (1996). IQ and ego resiliency. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 70(2), 346–361. Bloom, B. (Ed.) (1985). Developing talent in young people. New York: Ballantine. Burroughs, A. (2002). Running with scissors. New York: Picador. Burroughs, A. (2003). Dry. New York: Picador. Casey, N. (Ed.). (2002). An unholy quiet: Writers on depression. New York: HarperCollins. Cattell, R. B. (1971). The process of creative thought. In R. Cattell (Ed.), Abilities: Their structure, growth, and action (pp. 407–417). Boston: Houghton Mifflin. Cattell, R. B. (1990). Advances in Cattellian personality psychology. In H. Pervin (Ed.), Handbook of personality: Theory and research (pp. 101–111). New York: Guilford. Cheever, J. (1991). The journals of John Cheever. New York: Knopf. Coleridge, S. T. (1872). Biographica literaria: or Biographical sketches of my literary live and opinions (Vol. II). New York: Holt and Williams. Corno, L., & Kanfer, R. (1993). The role of volition in learning and performance. In L. Darling-Hammond (Ed.), Review of research in education, 19 (pp. 301–342). Washington, DC: American Educational Research Association. Costa, P. T., & McCrae, R. R. (1992). NEO PI-R professional manual. Lutz, FL: Psychological Assessment Resources. Cross, T. L., Speirs Neumeister, K. L., & Cassady, J. C. (2007). Psychological types of academically gifted adolescents. Gifted Child Quarterly, 51(3), 285–293. Csikszentmihalyi, M., Rathunde, K., & Whalen, S. (1993). Talented teenagers: The roots of success and failure. New York: Cambridge University Press. Dabrowski, K. (1965). Personality shaping through positive disintegration. Boston: Little, Brown. Dewey, J. (1934). Art and experience. New York: Putnam. Eysenck, H. J. (1993). Creativity and personality: Suggestions for a theory. Psychological Inquiry, 4(3), 147–178. Feinstein, E. (2001). Ted Hughes: The life of a poet. London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson. Feist, G. J. (1999). The influence of personality on artistic and scientific creativity. In R. J. Sternberg (Ed.), Handbook of creativity (pp. 273–296). New York: Cambridge University Press. Feist, G. J. (2007). An evolutionary model of artistic and musical creativity. In C. Martindale & P. Locher (Eds.), Evolutionary and neurocognitive approaches to aesthetics, creativity and the arts (pp. 15–30). Amityville, NY: Baywood Publishing. Freud, S. (1976). Creative writers and daydreaming. In A. Rothenberg & C. Hausman (Eds.), The creativity question (pp. 48–52). Durham, NC: Duke University Press. (Original work published 1908) Friedman, B. (1994). Writing past dark. New York: HarperPerennial. Friend, T. (1990, Dec. 9). Rolling Boyle. New York Times Magazine, pp. 50, 60–68. Friman, A., & Templin, C. (1994). An interview with Molly Peacock. Poets & Writers Magazine, 22(1), 23–31.

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Gannon, M. (2004). Return from silence: An interview with Norman Dubie. Poets & Writers Magazine, 32(6), 34–43. Garner, D. (1997, Dec. 8). Interview with Allan Gurganus. Salon Magazine. Retrieved from www.salon.com/books/int/1997/12/cov si 08gurganus.html. Ghiselin, B. (1952). The creative process. New York: Bantam. Ginsberg, A. (1984). Collected poems, 1947–1980. New York: Harper & Row. Hart, H. (2000). The world as a lie: James Dickey. New York: Picador. Helson, R. (1999). Institute of Personality Assessment and Research. In M. Runco & S. Pritzker (Eds.), Encyclopedia of creativity (Vol. 2, pp. 71–79). San Diego: Academic Press. Hill, J. (2001). Legacy of Luna. New York: HarperCollins. Hillesum, E. (1985). An interrupted life: The diaries of Etta Hillesum, 1941–1943. New York: Washington Square Press. Jamison, K. R. (1989). Mood disorders and patterns of creativity in British writers and artists. Psychiatry, 52, 125–134. Jamison, K. R. (1993). Touched with fire: Manic-depressive illness and the artistic temperament. New York: Free Press. Jenkins-Friedman, R. (1992). Zorba’s conundrum: Evaluative aspect of self-concept in talented individuals. Quest, 3(1), 1–7. Joyce, C. (1998). Interview with Russell Banks. Salon Magazine. Retrieved from www. salon.com/books/int/1998/01/cov si 05int3.html. Kakutani, M. (1995). The art of humor, I: Interview with Woody Allen. Paris Review, 136, 200–222. Kaufman, J. C. (2001). The Sylvia Plath effect: Mental illness in eminent creative writers. Journal of Creative Behavior, 35, 37–50. Kaufman, J. C., & Baer, J. (2002). I bask in dreams of suicide: Mental illness, poetry, and women. Review of General Psychology, 6(3), 271–286. Kaufman, J. C., & Baer, J. (Eds.). (2005). Creativity in domains: Faces of the muse. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum. Kris, E. (1976). On preconscious mental processes. In A. Rothenberg & C. Hausman (Eds.), The creativity question (pp. 135–142). Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Kuehl, L. (1978). Interview with Joan Didion. In G. Plimpton (Ed.), Women writers at work: The Paris Review interviews (pp. 319–336). New York: Penguin Books. Langer, S. (1957). Problems of art. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons. Lynn, K. S. (1988). Hemingway. New York: Fawcett Columbine. MacAdam, A. (1991). Interview with Octavio Paz. Paris Review, 119, 82–123. MacKinnon, D. (1978). In search of human effectiveness: Identifying and developing creativity. Buffalo, NY: Bearly Limited. Mays, J. (1995). In the jaws of the black dog. New York: HarperCollins. McCrae, R. R., & Costa, P. T. (1999). A five-factor theory of personality. In L. A. Pervin & O. P. John (Eds.), Handbook of personality theory and research (2nd ed., pp. 139–153). New York: Guilford Press. Miles, B. (1989). Ginsberg. New York: Simon & Schuster. Myers, I. B., & McCaulley, M. H. (1985). Manual: A guide to the development and use of the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator. Palo Alto, CA: Consulting Psychologists Press. Neubauer, A. (Ed.). (1994). Conversations on writing fiction: Interviews with 13 distinguished teachers of fiction writing in America. New York: HarperPerennial. Ozick, C. (1971). The pagan rabbi and other stories. New York: Knopf. Piechowski, M. M. (2006). Mellow out, they say: If only I could. Madison, WI: Yunasa Press.

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Piirto, J. (1978). The creative process and schooling of creative writers. Paper presented at the National Association for Gifted Children Conference, Houston. Piirto, J. (1985). The three-week trance diet. Columbus, OH: Carpenter Press. Piirto, J. (1992). Understanding those who create. Dayton, OH: Ohio Psychology Press. Piirto, J. (1994). Talented children and adults: Their development and education. New York: Macmillan. Piirto, J. (1995). A location in the Upper Peninsula: Essays, stories, poems. New Brighton, MN: Sampo Publishing. Piirto, J. (1998a). Understanding those who create (2nd ed.). Scottsdale, AZ: Gifted Psychology Press. Piirto, J. (1998b). Themes in the lives of successful contemporary U.S. women creative writers. Roeper Review, 21(1), 60–70. Piirto, J. (1998c). Feeling boys, thinking girls, and judging teachers: Talented students and the MBTI. Proceedings of the 1998 Conference of the Center for the Application of Personality Types (CAPT), Orlando, March 8. Piirto, J. (1999). Talented children and adults: Their development and education (2nd ed.). Columbus, OH: Prentice Hall. Piirto, J. (2002). “My teeming brain”: Understanding creative writers. Cresskill, NJ: Hampton Press. Piirto, J. (2004). Understanding creativity. Tempe, AZ: Great Potential Press. Piirto, J. (2006, September). The Piirto Piiramid and creativity in the domain of visual arts. Keynote speech at European Council for High Ability Conference, Lahti, Finland. Piirto, J. (in press). 20 years with the Dabrowski theory: An autoethnography. Advanced Development. Piirto, J., & Fraas, J. (1995). Androgyny in the personalities of talented adolescents. Journal for Secondary Gifted Education, I, 93–102. Piirto, J., & Johnson, G. (2004, May). Personality attributes of talented teenagers: The HSPQ and the MBTI. Paper presented at Wallace Symposium, Iowa City. Piirto, J., Montgomery, D., & May, J. (2008). A comparison of Dabrowski’s overexcitabilities by gender for American and Korean high school gifted students. High Ability Studies, 19(2), 141–153. Plato. (1952). Dialogues: The ion. In R. Hutchins (Ed.), The great books of the Western world (Vol. 7). Chicago: Encyclopedia Britannica. Plimpton, G. (1995a). The art of humor, II: Interview with Garrison Keillor. Paris Review, 136, 108–127. Plimpton, G. (1995b). The art of humor, III. Interview with Calvin Trillin. Paris Review, 136, 16–175. Prescott, F. C. (1920). The poetic mind. Ithaca, NY: Great Seal Books. Rayneri, L. J., Gerber, B. L., & Wiley, L. P. (2003). Gifted achievers and gifted underachievers: The impact of learning style preferences in the classroom. Journal of Secondary Gifted Education, 14(4), 197–204. Renzulli, J. (1978). What makes giftedness? Reexamining a definition. Phi Delta Kappan, 60, 180–184, 261. Richardson, J. (1986). Wallace Stevens: The early years, 1879–1923. New York: William Morrow. Rothenberg, A. (1990). Creativity and madness. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Runco, M. A. (2006). Reasoning and personal creativity. In J. C. Kaufman & J. Baer (Eds.), Creativity and reason in cognitive development (pp. 99–116). New York: Cambridge University Press.

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Rush, N. (1995). Healthy subversions. In N. Baldwin & D. Osen (Eds.), The writing life: A collection of essays and interviews with National Book Award winners (pp. 215–228). New York: Random House. Santayana, G. (1896). The sense of beauty: Being the outline of aesthetic theory. New York: Dover. Schapiro, M. (1999). Rewriting Bob Dole: Interview with Mark Helprin. Salon Magazine. Retrieved from www.salon1999.com/weekly/interview 960714.html. Schneiderman, L. (1988). The literary mind: Portraits in pain and creativity. New York: Insight. Simonton, D. K. (1994). Greatness: What makes history and why? New York: Guilford. Simonton, D. K. (1999). The origins of genius: Darwinian perspectives on creativity. New York: Oxford University Press. Simpson, L. (1972). North of Jamaica. New York: Harper & Row. Sinclair, U. (1956). The cup of fury. Great Neck, NY: Channel Press. Smith, J. (1999). Where the roots reach for the water. New York: North Point Press. Snyder, G. (2007). Back on the fire: Essays. Emeryville, CA: Avalon Publishing. Sternberg, R., & Davidson, J. (1995). The nature of insight. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Sternberg, R., & Lubart, T. I. (1991). An investment theory of creativity and its development. Human Development, 34, 1–31. Styron, W. (1990). Darkness visible: A memoir of madness. New York: Random House. Tannenbaum, A. (1983). Gifted children. New York: Macmillan. Teicholz, T. (1989). Interview with Cynthia Ozick. In G. Plimpton (Ed.), Women writers at work (pp. 291–317). New York: Penguin. The spirit within. (1995). Interview with Amy Tan. Salon Magazine. Retrieved from www.salon.com/12nov1995/feature/tan.html. Waldron, A. (1989, March 14). Writers and alcohol. Washington Post, pp. 13–15. Yeats, W. B. (1953). The autobiography of William Butler Yeats: Consisting of reveries over childhood and youth, the trembling of the veil, and dramatis personae. New York: Macmillan. Zimmerman, B. J., Bandura, A., & Martinez-Pons, M. (1992). Self-motivation for academic attainment: The role of self-efficacy beliefs and personal goal setting. American Educational Research Journal, 19(3), 663–676.

2 The Creative Writer, Dysphoric Rumination, and Locus of Control samaneh pourjalali, e. m. skrzynecky, and james c. kaufman

Throughout the course of writing this chapter, we have been struck with writer’s block, mild anxiety as the deadline approached and passed, and sporadic depression about it remaining unwritten. However, we are still among the lucky. Academic writers have a structure to follow and basic rules that prevent the writing process from becoming too overwhelming. The fear of a blank page can be overcome by the creation of the title page, insertion of the author’s contact information, and the importation of references. Academics regularly collaborate, use past research to guide present efforts, and seek input and feedback from colleagues. Conversely, creative writers are often unable to partake of these benefits. Their reputation as artists may depend primarily on their imagination. In academic writing, gathering sources and reflecting other people’s ideas constitute research; in poetry, these actions can be called plagiarism. When creative writers experience a roadblock, they do not have the luxury of the scientific manuals and databases with which to buffer their ideas. Most ideas and inspirations need to arise internally. Indeed, see Chapter 14 for more information about writer’s block. Historiometric and experimental data indicate several points of interest regarding creative writers and, specifically, poets. When compared to other creative professions, writers have a higher mortality rate (Cassandro, 1998; Kaufman, 2003; Kaun, 1991; Ludwig, 1995; Simonton, 1975). Both poets and fiction writers have higher suicide rates in comparison to other writers (Preti & Miotto, 1999). Writers also have a shorter lifespan than people in other occupations, including other artistic-related occupations (Cassandro, 1998; Kaun, 1991; Ludwig, 1995; Simonton, 1975). A large-scale study of almost 2,000 American, Chinese, Turkish, and Eastern European writers found that on average, poets died younger than fiction writers and non-fiction writers across all four cultures (Kaufman, 2003). Earlier studies (e.g., Ludwig, 1995; Simonton, 1975) also found poets to die the youngest of all writers. It is important to note, however, that general creativity (as associated with openness 23

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to experience) is not associated with earlier mortality (see Roberts, Kuncel, Shiner, Caspi, & Goldberg, 2007). Why does creative writing bear this dark side? Dysphoric rumination, the concept of locus of control, existing stereotypes of the mad genius, and the creative artist’s mood may offer insight into the psychology of the artist with regard to mental health, specifically depression and suicide ideation (which are the focus of this chapter). THE CREATIVE ARTIST AND MENTAL ILLNESS

Before we delve into the research it is important to review some facts: Approximately 1 in 5 people in America (18 years or older) suffers from mental illness. Depressive disorders occur in approximately 10% of the population, and approximately 1.2% of Americans have bipolar disorder, or manic depression (National Institute of Mental Health [NIMH], 2001). Without knowing these rates, it is hard to make meaningful comparisons. In one of most well known empirical studies, often used as a cornerstone for demonstrating a connection between creative writing and mental illness, structured interview were used to analyze 30 creative writers, 30 matched controls, and 1st-degree relatives of each group (Andreasen, 1987). Results revealed that the writers had a higher rate of mental illness, with a particular tendency toward bipolar and other affective disorders. Furthermore, the writers’ 1st-degree relatives were more likely to both be creative and have affective disorders. It is worth pointing out, however, that there have been several critiques of the methodology – such as issues with the sample and the interviewing process (Lindauer, 1994; Rothenberg, 1990, 1995; Schlesinger, 2003). In another study on eminent people, Jamison (1989) interviewed 47 British artists and writers and found that a significantly higher percentage of them suffered from some form of mental illness, particularly from affective disorders, than would be expected from population rates. Ludwig (1994) studied 59 female writers and 59 matched controls, and found that the writers were more likely to have mental illness, including mood disorders and general anxieties. Several studies have used personality measures, such as the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory (MMPI) or the Eysenck Personality Questionnaire (EPQ), which also measure mental illness. The best-known line of research in this vein is by legendary researcher Frank Barron (1969), who tested many prominent and creative individuals throughout his work with the Institute for Personality Assessment and Research. Most creators scored higher on the pathology-related scales of the MMPI. Typical creativity tests (such as those used in this study) reward anti-social or unusual behavior as much as they reward specifically creative behavior. It may not be that bizarre, then, that people who score high on creativity tests also

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demonstrate anti-social or unusual behavior. Such a finding could be more a statement on the creativity test used than any deeper insights into anti-social behavior and real creativity. Historiometric research has also been utilized to assess the link between creativity and mental illness. Traditional historiometric research involves reading biographies of eminent people and noting life events (marriages, winning prizes, battling sea monsters). A typical historiometric study might analyze the word content of a president’s inaugural address or categorize the themes present in Shakespearean sonnets (Simonton, 1990). Perhaps the most impressive historiometric study was conducted by Ludwig (1995), who investigated over 1,000 eminent individuals who were the subjects of major biographies written between 1960 and 1990. Among many other discoveries, he found a higher incidence of mental illness among people in artistic professions (e.g., writing, art, and theater) than in non-artistic professions (e.g., business, politics, and science), similar to Nettle’s (2006) work. In another study, Ludwig (1998) found that visual artists with a more emotive style were more likely to suffer from depression and other disorders than artists with more formal styles. THE CREATIVE POET

Poets seem to be among the least lucky of creative writers. Studies (e.g., Ludwig, 1995; Simonton, 1975) have found poets to die the youngest of all writers. Staltaro (2003) looked at 43 published poets and found that approximately one-third had a history of at least one psychiatric condition and more than half had been in therapy (this is notably higher than population rates). However, poets did not score significantly higher than the norm on a measure of current depression. Nettle (2006) examined poets, mathematicians, visual artists, and average folks, finding higher levels of schizotypy in poets and visual artists and lower levels in mathematicians. Kaufman (2005) studied 826 writers from Eastern Europe from the 4th century to the present day. He found that poets were significantly more likely to suffer from mental illness than any other type of writer (fiction writer, playwright, non-fiction writer). Similarly, Thomas and Duke (2007) found that eminent poets showed significantly more cognitive distortion than fiction writers; they hypothesized that poets were more apt to accept depressive thinking. Stirman and Pennebaker (2001) found that suicidal poets were likely to use words associated with the self (as opposed to the collective) in their poetry, as opposed to non-suicidal poets. The authors of the study suggested that this tendency revealed an inward focus and lack of social integration. Ludwig’s (1995) large-scale study found poets to have among the highest rates of psychosis and depression of all of the many different professionals studied (ranging from business people to artists), as well as the highest number of suicides. Post (1996) found mixed results for poets: They

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were more likely to have bipolar disorders, but less likely to have affective and personality disorders than fiction writers and playwrights. DYSPHORIC RUMINATION BY REVISION

Dysphoric rumination is marked by repetitive thoughts focused on questions of why, how, what if, and what now related to one’s depressed mood and depressive symptoms (Lyubomirsky, Kasri, & Zehm, 2003). Ruminative thoughts like these are often absorbing, compelling, and self-perpetuating (Lyubomirsky & Nolen-Hoeksema, 1993). Therefore, they may tax one’s cognitive capacities and thus hinder the writer’s creative writing process. This especially concerns writers whose stories and poetry are inspired by and written as an expression of their tormented lives. Two distinct dimensions of rumination are self- and symptom-focused rumination (McBride & Bagby, 2006). Self-focused rumination is defined by repetitive thoughts and behaviors on the self and the effects of depression (e.g., “Why do I act this way?”). Symptom-focused rumination is defined by rumination on the symptoms of depression (Bagby & Parker, 2001; Bagby, Rector, Bacchiochi, & McBride, 2004). Self-focused rumination appears to be a personality trait associated with neuroticism and, as such, is stable even in the absence of depression (Bagby et al., 2004). Depending on the writer’s work, the dysphoric rumination in which the author engages may be of the self-focused or symptom-focused variety. The process of revision requires rumination of phrases, word choices, events, and emotions associated with the piece. Even though rumination may help in organizing one’s thoughts and emotions into compartmentalized cognitions, there appear to be various negative consequences to dysphoric rumination. Dysphoric rumination regarding one’s self are related to decreased problem-solving abilities and increased depression (Lyubomirsky, Kasri, & Zehm, 2003; Nolen-Hoeksema, 1991, 1996), as well as poor goal achievement (Lyubomirsky et al., 2003; Ward, Lyubomirsky, Sousa, & Nolen-Hoeksema, 2003). If the writer’s thoughts are a reflection of his/her inner turmoil, inspired by a troubled self, or the result of anguish or despair, then revision, for this artist, is in essence rumination of his/her distress. For such writers revision becomes deliberate dysphoric rumination (i.e., passively focusing on symptoms, causes, and consequences of personal distress; McCullough et al., 2007; Nolen-Hoeksema & Jackson, 2001). While ruminating about a past traumatic experience, which may be the basis for poetic inspiration, the individual may re-experience the “cognitive, affective, motivational, and physiological consequences of the transgression as if they were occurring once again” (McCullough et al., 2007, p. 491). Depression may also occur or be prolonged if individuals ruminate about their anger or depressive symptoms (Kuehner & Weber, 1999; McCullough

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et al., 2007; Mor & Winquist, 2002; Nolen-Hoeksema et al., 1999; Rusting & Nolen-Hoeksema, 1998; Lyubomirsky et al., 1998; Lyubomirsky & NolenHoeksema, 1995; Nolen-Hoeksema, 1991, 2001). Additional adverse effects of rumination include an increase in negative self-evaluations, external locus of control, and hopelessness (Lyubomirsky & Nolen-Hoeksema, 1995). Studies have also indicated a positive correlation between rumination and revenge and a negative correlation between rumination and forgiveness; in addition, negative rumination may be a catalyst for displaced aggression (McCullough, Bellah, Kilpatrick, & Johnson, 2001). The negative consequences of rumination arise as a result of dysphoric responses to rumination. Therefore, future studies and historiometric evaluations should assess the link between a writer’s health, death, and work. Given the aforementioned studies on dysphoric rumination, it seems that the type of writing produced by the author is of great importance when drawing a relation between rumination and health. Perhaps a writer who produces a work that is reflective of hardships, sorrows, and hopelessness is more prone to illness and more likely to free himself of the pain of living. Perhaps writers whose stories are inspired by and reflective of the positive aspects of life are themselves less susceptible to mental health problems relative to other writers. Perhaps the reason the writer’s cure does not work for the creative writer as a journal writer is due to revision extensive revision by the former. A creative writer whose story reflects his/her troubled life ruminates every time he/she revises his or her work. Such writers are, likely, undermining the health benefits of writing due to their constant involvement in the negative ideas that marks their tormented lives and makes up an interesting story. FEMALE POETS AND WRITERS

Female poets were significantly more likely to suffer from mental illness (as measured by suicide attempts, hospitalizations, or specific periods of depression that warranted discussion in a brief biography) than other types of women writers (fiction writers, playwrights, and non-fiction writers) and male writers (fiction writers, poets, playwrights, and non-fiction writers; Kaufman, 2001a). A study comparing female poets with female journalists, politicians, actresses, novelists, and visual artists revealed that poets were significantly more likely to have mental illness than any other group (Kaufman, 2001a). This finding was dubbed the “Sylvia Plath Effect.” Why should poets, especially female poets, be at a greater disadvantage in terms of mental health when compared to other writers? One possibility is that females are more prone to ruminate about their emotions (Garnefski, Teerds, Kraaji, Legerstee, & van den Kommer, 2004). Rumination regarding a depressive mood is more prevalent among females (McBride & Bagby, 2006; Nolen-Hoeksema, Larson, & Grayson, 1999). The result of such reflection can

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be seen in the works of many female writers; male writing tends to exhibit less personal and more abstract concepts (Colley & Todd, 2002). Previous studies have indicated that depressive affect among females may be indicative of elevated levels of interpersonal entanglement; in essence, the social expectation for females to be “affable” may in fact produce stress (Gore, Aseltine, & Colten, 1993). Females are generally more astute about external influences such as familial discord, the amount of royalties received, and critiques of their work (Kaufman & Baer, 2002). Historically, writing has been considered a masculine activity, requiring the female author to make the decision to be an artist or a woman but not both (Wallace, 2002). Despite this stereotype, female authors such as Anne Sexton, Edith Wharton, and Virginia Woolf have triumphed in attaining a notable place in literature. THE WRITER AND SUICIDE

An early historiometric study of creativity and mental illness was done by Juda (1949), who embarked on a 17-year study of 409 German people. These included 113 creative individuals in the arts, 181 scientists, and 115 designated as control. Juda found more evidence of mental illness and more suicide in the artist group and their families. Jamison (1993) examined 36 major British and Irish poets born between 1705 and 1805. She found that, compared to general population, they were more than five times as likely to commit suicide. Several studies have examined suicide rates – with a variety of results, although writers tend to have higher rates. Lester (1994) studied writers from the United Kingdom, Russia, Japan, and the United States and found higher rates of suicide than in the general population. Stack (1997) examined suicide rates among Americans in the arts and found that artists were three times more likely to commit suicide than nonartists. Preti and Miotto (1999) examined suicide rates in architects, painters, sculptors, writers, poets, and playwrights, going back to the 1800s. They found that writers and poets had the highest rates of suicide and architects and painters had the lowest rates. A further investigation (Preti, De Biasi, & Miotto, 2001) found that musicians had a lower suicide rate than both literary and visual artists. Schneider (2002) looked at suicide rates in Swiss writers, artists, philosophers, composers, and mathematicians compared to the general population. Writers, artists, and philosophers had higher rates in the Swiss population; the other three groups had lower rates. Stack’s (2001) investigation into suicide across many different occupations found that people in the arts did, indeed, have a higher-than-average suicide rate – but it is worth pointing out that he also found that dentists have (by far) the highest suicide rate. The act of suicide can be thought of as a form of aggression both to one’s self and to those left behind. This is not to lessen the fact that those who choose to end their lives suffer from, at the very least, mental turmoil and/or illness. However, planning and deliberation seem to be characteristic of the

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acts of suicide (as with Sylvia Plath, Anne Sexton, Ernest Hemingway). Artists who commit suicide may be regarded as poor problem solvers – in line with the research on dysphoric rumination revealing dysphoric ruminators as poor problem solvers (Lyubomirsky, Tucker, Cadwell, & Berg, 1999). However, the preparations taken to commit suicide suggests that these artists were intellectually intact enough to successfully plan and execute their deaths – as well as, in some instances, write a final note and/or poem (e.g., Robert E. Howard, Vladimir Mayorovsky). As such, it can be argued that the artist, through a cycle of depression and rumination, may be taking aggressive action against his or her persecutors (e.g., a spouse, publishers, one’s self). REVISION: “WHITE-HOT” VARIETY

“First thought, best thought.” – Allen Ginsberg (Timpane & Watts, 2001, p. 152)

Creative and eminent works are frequently believed to have materialized from sudden inspiration, an unconscious stroke of “genius.” This myth, which shrouds great writings and specifically poetry, has its origins in the Romantic era (Sawyer, 2006; Sternberg & Lubart, 1999; see Chapter 10). Such a romanticized view of pure, untrained, unconscious inspiration and brilliance is not rooted in reality. Indeed, great works of writing are typically a result of laborious draft writing and countless revision (Sawyer, 2006; Weisberg, 1986). As poet Dylan Thomas once said, “Almost any poem is fifty to a hundred revisions – and that’s after it’s well along” (quoted in Hayes, 1989, p. 142). Nonetheless, the biographies of many eminent poets, it is interesting to note that the publication dates or the writing of their best known works shares a relatively close timeline with their suicide. For example, John Berryman’s His Toy, His Dream, His Rest (1968) was his final published work before jumping to his death in 1972. Sylvia Plath’s final collection of poems, Ariel, was written in the last 6 months of her life (Ames, 1996). Anne Sexton’s An Awful Rowing toward God was published posthumously in 1975, a year after her suicide. American poet Hart Crane’s The Bridge was published in 1930, 2 years before his suicide.1 Historians are left to speculate whether these writings were created with the intention of being the author’s final work given that for many writers their sense of identity is integral to their craft (eminent writers are signified by their writings). “White hot” poetry – poetry with few, if any, revisions – is a common element of work written by eminent poets who shortly thereafter committed 1

It is important to note that there are many other possible reasons for such a connection, including the recency effect, i.e., the tendency to remember and enjoy the most recently produced work. This phenomenon has been found in creative work (Kaufman, Christopher, & Kaufman, 2008).

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suicide. Well-known poetic giants such as Plath and Sexton did very little revision on their last great works. Ariel was written during Plath’s last 6 months of life; this time frame suggests little chance for extensive revision (Timpane & Watts, 2001).2 Plath had earned a reputation as a skilled and purposeful poet, poring over the thesaurus for the flawless word, yet she forfeited her regular writing tempo for a more urgent, speedy style near the end of her life (Ames, 1996). This lack of extensive revision was uncharacteristic, and as her personal complications mounted (funds were low, she was ill, and her husband, Ted Hughes, was expecting a child with his lover), she continued to write in this atypical style. What would have resulted had such poets continued to revise their final works? Perhaps the result may not have been their final work. Some authors’ last works (e.g., Plath’s Ariel) are considered among an author’s finest. Yet these works were written close to their deaths, so that poets such as Anne Sexton, Hart Crane, Sergei Yesenin, and Randall Jarrell likely had little time for revision. An intriguing question that remains to be answered is why the writer’s cure does not help creative writers. As we will soon discuss, Kaufman and Sexton (2006) argue that “the formation of a narrative is a necessary precondition for expressive writing to have salutary effects” (p. 268). It may be likely that if poets like Plath or Sexton revised their poems more, thereby casting their traumatic/emotional events or inspirations in more of a narrative form with a beginning, middle, and end, their emotions/mental disturbances may have become more manageable. This begs the question: Does writing of a “whitehot” variety bring about and foster impulsiveness and mental instability, or is the lack of revision a consequence of the mental illness/depression? RUMINATION AND THE STEREOTYPE

As previous studies have shown (see Chapter 16), poetry that is expressive or fragmented (i.e., frequent use of first-person pronouns) is less conducive to psychological health and may even be harmful to it (Lepore & Smyth, 2002). Conversely, poems following a concise narrative (i.e., frequent use of third-person pronouns) may provide more psychological benefits (Pennebaker & Seagal, 1999). Interestingly, linguistic analysis indicates that suicidal poets were more prone to use first-person pronouns (Stirman & Pennebaker, 2001). Kaufman and Sexton (2006) argue that the formation of a narrative is a necessary precondition for expressive writing to have salutary effects. In contrast, writing that is fragmented may not only fail to improve health, but may actually be harmful. The key elements are the degree to which the writing is expressive 2

The authors acknowledge the scholarly concern for authenticity regarding Sylvia Plath’s final poems within the Ariel collection with regard to any possible editorial influence from Ted Hughes. Nonetheless, Ariel in its current published form is still largely considered to be the relatively undoctored work of the credited author.

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and the degree to which a narrative is present. It is the interaction of these variables that creates the seemingly opposite findings present in the literature. A feature of depression is the frequent and unintentional cognition of negative memories and ideas (Joorman et al., 2005). In turn, depression leads to rumination in an attempt to “figure out where it all went wrong” and remedy the negative situation; this results in prolonging and/or increasing depression (Nolen-Hoeksema, 2000; Nolen-Hoeksema et al., 1999; Roberts, Gilboa, & Gotlib, 1998). As stated earlier, studies have shown poets to have among the highest rates of psychosis and depression of all of the many different professionals studied (ranging from business people to artists), as well as the highest number of suicides. Thus, if poets engage in dysphoric rumination while composing or revising their poems, they may access negative memories faster, which may then act as negative reinforcement, causing depression or lowered affect (Joorman et al., 2005; Lyubomirsky, Caldwell, & Nolen-Hoeksema, 1998). When imagining the likes of Poe or Plath, one cannot think about their “romanticism” without thinking of their addictions, neuroses, and assorted personal demons. Some argue that the correlation between creativity and mental disturbance is merely the result of the researcher’s perspective (Schlesinger, 2002). There is a great deal of truth to this view; it is easy to get carried away by spurious correlations and see links where none exist. Others argue that, to some degree, artists may view depression and mood disorders positively. In a recent study of various artists, the participants responded that depression assisted them by fostering their creativity (Yarhouse & Kreeft Turcic, 2003). Romo and Alfonso (2003) studied Spanish painters and found that one of the implicit theories that they held about creativity involved the role of psychological disorders. This theory stated that isolation and personal conflicts were at the heart of art. These associations do not necessarily mean that artists desire such a connection. Indeed, others have suggested that creators use their art as a form of self-therapy, trying to heal themselves as they express their feelings (e.g., Spaniol, 2001). Kaufman, Bromley, and Cole (2006) studied how people’s opinions about the “mad genius” stereotype were associated with their own creativity. They found that people who did better on the Remote Associates Test, a measure of creativity, tended to endorse the “mad genius” stereotype. People who rated themselves as being more creative tended to feel strongly about the stereotype – either agreeing or disagreeing with it – but were less likely to be neutral. It makes sense that people who are creative might think more about a connection between creativity and mental illness, regardless of the truth behind such a connection. WOMEN AND RUMINATION

As we have noted earlier, research has found several interesting tendencies among female creative writers, namely the “Sylvia Plath effect” in which female

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poets have a higher probability of being mentally ill and of dying younger than other types of writers (Kaufman, 2001). Female creative writers may also have higher stress levels (Kaufman, 2001). Additionally, women are twice as likely as men to suffer from a major depressive episode (Kessler, McGonagle, Swartz, Blazer, & Nelson, 1993; Nolen-Hoeksema, 1990; Weissman & Klerman, 1977) and are more likely to ruminate or brood when depressed than men (NolenHoeksema et al., 1999). Depressed females tend to analyze any potential causes, significance, and repercussion of their negative affect to a greater extent than males (Butler & Nolen-Hoeksema, 1994; Nolen-Hoeksema, 1987, 1991, 2001; Nolen-Hoeksema & Davis, 1999). This style of thinking seems to be present during the revision process of poems. The process of rumination, an external locus of control (i.e., “low sense of mastery”), and chronic strain (due to societal and/or personal expectations) negatively reinforce each other and prolong or bring about depressive symptoms (Kuehner & Weber, 1999; Nolen-Hoeksema et al., 1999; Piirto, 1998). This cycle of depression, strain, and rumination may all contribute to writing moving poetry, but at what cost? CREATIVITY AND MOOD

There is more to the “dark side of creativity” literature than the question of mental illness. Another debate is whether being in a bad mood (officially known as “negative affect”) will get you to be more creative (also see Chapter 7). Some studies have found results that support this connection. A few studies have found that positive mood inhibits creative performance (e.g., Kaufmann & Vosburg, 1997; see Kaufmann, 2003, for a review), while other studies have found that negative mood either has no effect (e.g., Grawitch, Munz, & Kramer, 2003) on creativity or can enhance creative performance. Kaufmann and Vosburg (2002) looked at positive and negative mood in creative problem solving. Interesting, they found that a positive mood led to better scores in early idea production (similar to past findings, most recently Gasper, 2004). But a negative mood led to better scores in later idea production. George and Zhou (2002) found that negative moods were related to higher levels of creativity (as measured by supervisor ratings) when rewards and recognition for creative work were salient. An equally large body of research, however, has found that positive emotions and a good mood can have beneficial influences on creative performance. Several studies, many led by Alice Isen (Estrada, Isen, & Young, 1994; Isen, Daubman, & Nowicki, 1987; Isen, Johnson, Mertz, & Robinson, 1985; Isen, Labroo, Durlach, 2004; Montgomery, Hodges, & J. S. Kaufman, 2004), found that participants who were induced into a good mood showed higher creativity than those induced into neutral or negative moods. Similarly, Lynton and Salovey (1997) found that students in a good mood wrote better-constructed fiction and non-fiction than students in a bad mood, though reliable ratings

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for the creativity of the pieces were not obtained. Schere (1998) found that both writers and artists showed improved mood after being creative within their own domain (there was no effect when writers created art or artists wrote). Locher, Frens, and Overbeeke (2007) found that students in a good mood (induced by giving candy) rated a digital camera as having strong visual appeal. Still, there are studies that have found no relationship. Verhaeghen, Joormann, and Khan (2005) found that being in a current depressed mood was not associated with creativity. One criticism of this research could be that in nearly all studies, mood was induced. In other words, the moods were triggered by being asked to remember a happy or sad memory or being shown a funny or upsetting scene from a movie. Yet typically, people experience moods based on their own thoughts, emotions, or spontaneously occurring life events. Amabile, Barsade, Mueller, and Staw (2005) studied the relationship of creativity and mood in organizational employees working on potentially creative products. The researchers found significant results across their multiple measures. Creative performance (self and peer evaluated) was positively related to being in a good mood; however, there was no relationship between creative performance and being in a bad mood. Flow, proposed by Csikszentmihalyi (1990), argues that participating in a creative event can be seen as an optimal experience. Perry’s (1999) interviews with well-known writers found that creative writers consistently described writing in flow as being exhilarating, extraordinary, an out-of-body experience, and at times almost orgasmic. Most of the writers she interviewed saw their creative process as a markedly good thing. A DETRIMENT: AN EXTERNAL LOCUS OF CONTROL

Julian Rotter’s concept of locus of control (LOC) has its roots in sociobehaviorism. This theory, which incorporates social reinforcement, describes individuals’ perception of the influences over their lives. An individual with a high internal locus of control believes that he/she is primarily responsible for the occurrences in his/her life, whereas an individual with a high external locus of control believes that other forces (such as fate or chance), external influences, and people are primarily responsible for the happenings in his/her life. Their LOC reflects one’s self-efficacy and consequently one’s self-esteem. In simplistic terms, Rotter’s theory claims that behavior is determined by both external stimuli and the reinforcement of such stimuli (Shultz, Shultz, & Hergenhahm, 2006). The pivotal aspect of LOC is that it is the cognitive processing of such stimuli that determines individuals’ perception of their ability to master their destiny (internal LOC) or succumb to the influences of external forces, such as luck or fate (external LOC). The relation between creative writing and mental illness may be further explained using Rotter’s LOC. We act on the world in relation to our perception

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of the world. Our sense of reality guides and dictates our responsive behavior. The working environment of a writer is bohemian in comparison to more conventional occupations. For writers with an internal LOC, this creative working environment may serve as a vault, impenetrable to outside influences or changes. In contrast, writers with an external LOC are like white rats in a “Skinner box.” Due to an exaggerated perception of the environment influences, they believe they maintain very little control. The internals are confident in their abilities and resolute; they maintain personal responsibility for both their successes and failures. Conversely, writers in the mental Skinner box do not express the same cognitions regarding the environment as the internals. The externals are faced with anxiety, not knowing when the use of their services will expire or whether the subsequent reinforcement will be a food pellet (publication and success) or an electric shock (professional and personal failure). The poet and creative writer may be viewed as “an instrument played by the muses as they subject ‘him’ to their wiles” (Lavis, 2005, p. 154). Let us now consider specific instances of the influence of LOC on the writer. The writing profession is rife with the stresses of deadlines, publication, and public acceptance. Additionally, there is little security within the profession. The manner in which writers combat these stresses can reflect their LOC. When compared to those with an external LOC, writers with an internal LOC are more adept at dealing with stress in a positive way. Specifically, internals encounter lower levels of stress and behave in ways that diminish negative reinforcements and help them execute their objectives (O’Brien, 1984). The internals recognize environmental stressors and appropriately manage their time so as not to negatively influence their mental or physical health. In comparison, externals typically exhibit behaviors incompatible with achieving their objectives, thereby increasing their stress levels (O’Brien, 1984). In a study of gender and occupational status, external locus of control was correlated with lower achievement and socioeconomic status as well as lowered opportunity for social advancement (Smith, Dugan, & Trompenaars, 1997). In the corporate world men have traditionally held position of power, whereas women have traditionally held clerical and secretarial positions (Silverstone & Towler, 1983; Truss, Goffee, & Jones, 1995). This idea could be extended to the artistic world. To be a known and appreciated writer, one’s work must be purchased and circulated to the public. Female writers, in comparison to male writers, have historically had to contend with societal pressures. Such traditional Western social expectations of females as caretakers (e.g., motherhood, wife, household management) may contribute to the conflict professional female creative writers experience (Kaufman & Baer, 2002; Piirto, 1998). As described earlier, females also tend to be ruminators (Garnefski, Teerds, Kraaji, Legerstee, & van den Kommer, 2004; Nolen-Hoeksema et al., 1999) and are socialized early to be oriented toward the collective whereas males are socialized to be independent (Jack, 1991; Kirsch & Kuiper, 2002; Miller, 1976).

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Social reinforcement of emotionality in females may contribute to ruminative tendencies; that is, girls, as opposed to boys, are not discouraged from crying because that emotionality is considered a unique “feminine” characteristic (Nolen-Hoeksema, 1990). This social expectation of females to exhibit nurturing, noncompetitive, passive qualities is not conducive to the fierce, pressure-ridden world of art. As noted earlier, having one’s work published can be a harrowing, painful process. Tenacity and a stalwart constitution are necessities. Males are typically socialized to have such qualities of determination. It is understandable then that female poets would have internalized thoughts and behaviours resulting from an external locus of control as part of their upbringing. Men and women who engaged in dysphoric rumination have reported feeling less control over their lives and less hopeful about their future (i.e., having an external locus of control; Lyubomirsky & Nolen-Hoeksema, 1995; McBride & Bagby, 2006; Nolen-Hoeksema & Jackson, 2001). In particular, females feel that negative emotions are not under their control, indicating an external locus of control, in addition to feeling responsible for the emotional energy in relationships (Nolen-Hoeksema & Jackson, 2001). CONCLUSION

We have discussed the phenomenological relationship between mental illness and eminent creative writers. Studies have found that eminent creative writers (and especially eminent female poets) are more likely than other eminent artists to suffer from mental illness, die young, and commit suicide (Cassandro, 1998; Kaufman, 2001, 2003; Kaun, 1991; Ludwig, 1994, 1995; Preti & Miotto, 1999; Simonton, 1975). We have also presented various theories as to why creative writers are prone to these afflictions. Among such theories included the concepts of dysphoric rumination, mood, and locus of control. It is important to avoid flippancy when discussing creative writing and mental illness. Yet neither should one refuse to examine and question this topic for fear of causing offense. Rather, those within academia and the mental health field should strive to explore and determine circumstances under which the positive and healthy aspects of creativity are outweighed by the negative. Despite existing data on creative writers and poets, there are more questions to be answered. The maintenance and promotion of both creativity and mental health by artists (and all individuals) are viable psychological issues. The idea that creativity may result in tragedy can be hard to comprehend. What would have become of Plath, Crane, Howard, and Hemingway had they not met their untimely demise? What gems would the literary world hold today? What pains would their families and loved ones be spared? Such questions will remain unanswered. Yet through increased attention to mental balance and better understanding of the elements of creativity as they pertain to writers,

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the psychological community can continue to strive for an encompassing understanding of the concept of creativity. The creative writer must evolve into a being able to both pragmatically solve his or her problems and maintain a state of mental health while influencing society’s collective mind via art. The objective, then, of researching eminent writers is expressed through Dylan Thomas’ eloquent words: “Do not go gently into that good night. Rage, rage against the dying of the light” (Thomas, 1937). A more thorough understanding of these phenomena will aid writers in combating their inner demons and thus not succumb to a stereotypically tragic end. references Amabile, T. M. (1996). Creativity in context: Update to The Social Psychology of Creativity. Boulder, CO: Westview Press. American Psychiatric Association (1994). Diagnostic and statistical manual of mental disorders (4th ed.). Washington, DC: American Psychiatric Association. Ames, L. (1996). Sylvia Plath: A biographical note. In S. Plath, The bell jar (25th anniversary ed., pp. 277–296). New York: HarperCollins. Andreasen, N. C. (1987). Creativity and mental illness: Prevalence rates in writers and their first-degree relatives. American Journal of Psychiatry, 144, 1288–1292. Bagby, R. M., & Parker, J. D. A. (2001). Relation of rumination and distraction with neuroticism and extraversion in a sample of patients with major depression. Cognitive Theory and Research, 25, 91–102. Bagby, R. M., Rector, N. A., Bacchiochi, J., & McBride, C. (2004). The stability of the Response Styles Rumination Scale in a sample of patients with major depression. Cognitive Theory and Research, 28, 527–538. Barron, F. (1969). Creative person and creative process. New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston. Butler, L. D., & Nolen-Hoeksema, S. (1994). Gender differences in responses to depressed mood in a college sample. Sex Roles, 30, 331–346. Cassandro, V. J. (1998). Explaining premature mortality across fields of creative endeavor. Journal of Personality, 66, 805–833. Colley, A., & Todd, Z. (2002). Gender-linked differences in the style and content of e-mails to friends. Journal of Language and Social Psychology, 21, 380–392. Csikszentmihalyi, M. (1990). Flow: The psychology of optimal experience. New York: HarperCollins. Donaldson, C., & Lam, D. (2004). Rumination, mood and social problem-solving in major depression. Psychological Medicine, 34, 1309–1318. Erikson, E. H. (1959). Identity and the life cycle. New York: International Universities Press. Garnefski, N., Teerds, J., Kraaji, V., Legerstee, J., & Van Den Kommer, T. (2004). Cognitive emotion regulation strategies and depressive symptoms: Differences between males and females. Personality and Individual Differences, 35, 267–276. Gore, S., Aseltine, R. H. Jr., & Colten, M. E. (1993). Gender, social-relational involvement, and depression. Journal of Research on Adolescents, 3, 101–125. Haigh, E. A. P., Armey, M., Fresco, D. M., Auerbach, R., & Abela, J. R. Z. (2004, November). Brooding and pondering: Isolating the active ingredients of depressive rumination with confirmatory factor analysis in an adult clinical sample. Poster presented at the

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3 “The more I write, the better I write, and the better I feel about myself”: Mood Variability and Mood Regulation in Student Journalists and Creative Writers ` kohanyi adele

In the movie The Hours, the writer Virginia Woolf is depicted as odd and volatile. In one scene she is prostrate, incapable of leaving her bed, and in the next she explodes in a flow of fiery and meaningless utterances. When Woolf announces to her husband that she has at last found the opening sentence to her novel Mrs. Dalloway, he hopes that writing will be what it has always been for her, a respite from her suffering. Unfortunately, this moment of peace is not to last, because manic-depression will eventually drive Woolf to suicide. This movie is one of many that crystallizes the view that there is a relationship between bipolar mood disorder and creative writing. This relationship does not only exist in the popular imagination but has also been demonstrated by numerous systematic studies. The purpose of this chapter is to explore this association by studying mood variability, rather than bipolar mood disorder, and by studying student writers rather than eminent ones. A second goal is to determine whether the act of writing improves mood in writers. In this chapter, I first briefly outline the relationship between mood disorders and creative writing. I then review evidence for a relationship between subclinical mood variability and bipolar disorder, thus making it reasonable to explore a link between mood variability and creative writing. Finally, I review the effects of mood on creativity before focusing on the effects of writing on mood. MOOD DISORDERS AND CREATIVE WRITING

A growing body of research relying on biographies and autobiographies (Jamison, 1993; Kaufman, 2001, 2005; Kaufman & Sexton, 2006; Ludwig, 1992; Post, 1994, 1996; Walker, Koestner, & Hum, 1995) and on direct interviews with creative writers and other creators (Andreasen, 1987; Andreasen & Canter, 1974; Jamison, 1989; Ludwig, 1994; Piirto, 1998, 2002) suggests that creative writers have a higher rate of mood disorders than the general population (see 41

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Chapters 2 and 16 for a review). Indeed, these studies consistently found that from 50% to 80% of creative writers studied suffered from a mood disorder (in particular, bipolar disorder), as compared with around 1.5% (bipolar) and 10% (unipolar) of the general population (Goodwin & Jamison, 2007). IS THERE A RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN SUBCLINICAL MOOD VARIABILITY AND WRITING?

To the extent that there is a relationship between mood disorders and creative writing, it is reasonable to suppose that a relation exists between normal, subclinical mood variability and writing. This supposition relies on the assumption that bipolar disorder and normal mood variability exist on a continuum. Indeed, it has been claimed that bipolar illness spans a wide spectrum ranging from bipolar I at its most extreme, to bipolar II, cyclothymia, and temperamental instability (moody, agitated, and angry personality) at the lower extremes (Akiskal, 2003; Akiskal, Bourgeois, Angst, Post, Moller, & Hirschfeld, 2000; Angst & Marneros, 2001; Judd & Akiskal, 2003; Kelsoe, 2003). In other words, the contention is that subclinical mood variability exists on the lower end of a continuum with mood disorders at the upper end. Other researchers argue further that, at the end of the mild spectrum, there is considerable overlap between temperamental instability and normality (Akiskal et al., 2000; Goodwin & Jamison, 2007; Kraepelin, 1921). There is some support for the existence of such a dimensional model. Clinicians anecdotally report the case of patients who exhibit symptoms of mood disorders and other mental illnesses, but in subsyndromal forms that do not meet Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders Fourth Revision (DSM–IV) (American Psychiatric Association, 1994) criteria. These particular patterns of behavior have been called shadow syndromes (Ratey & Johnson, 1998). More systematic studies also support the claim that normal mood and mood disorders span a continuum. For example, one study found that, within a population of normal teenagers, a subgroup exhibited depressive and cyclothymic temperaments, meaning that they showed characteristics of mood disorders but within the normal range (Akiskal et al., 1998). Another study revealed that relatives of individuals with bipolar disorder had a higher incidence of affective temperaments (cyclothymic or hyperthymic) than control groups (Lauer, Bronisch, Kainz, Schreiber, Holsboer, & Krieg, 1997). In addition, individuals who did not meet DSM–IV (1994) criteria for bipolar disorder responded to mood stabilizers (Akiskal et al., 2000). These claims have been disputed by some (i.e., Baldessarini, 2000; Meyer & Keller, 2003; Patten, 2006), but make tenable the hypothesis that there could be subclinical versions of mood disorders and that mood disorders exist on the same spectrum as normal mood variability.

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Given that research has proposed a relationship between bipolar disorder and subclinical mood variability, it is possible that individuals who exhibit high mood variability are more likely to be involved in creative writing than individuals with more stable moods. This question was examined by investigating the parallels between participants’ EEG patterns and their profiles on personality tests. Student poets not diagnosed with a mental illness were found to score higher than a nonwriting control group on the manic subscale of the MMPI (Makarec & Persinger, 1985). To my knowledge, no other study has investigated this hypothesis. However, there is an established relationship between mood and writing such that writing improves mood. I first examine the relationship between mood and creativity to place the discussion within a larger context and then focus on mood and writing. RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN MOOD AND CREATIVITY

Research suggests that positive mood can either facilitate or inhibit creativity contingent on task requirements (i.e., Kaufmann, 2003; Vosburg, 1998a, 1998b). There is a solid body of research supporting the position that positive mood promotes superior performance on tasks such as word associations, word categorization, and creative problem solving. Indeed, participants in whom positive affect had been induced tended to generate more unusual responses on word association tasks than negative and neutral mood participants (Isen, Johnson, Mertz, & Robinson, 1985). For example, positive mood participants were more likely to respond “lush” as opposed to “rug” when prompted with the word “carpet.” Positive mood participants also perceived more interrelatedness between seemingly disparate material and categorized stimuli into broader and more inclusive categories in sorting and rating tasks (Isen & Daubman, 1984). Such participants were more likely to rate atypical examplars such as “camel,” “feet,” and “elevator” as belonging to the category “vehicle” than other participants. In addition, participants in positive affective states performed better on creative problem solving tasks (Isen, Daubman, & Nowicki, 1987). A typical creative problem is the candle task (Duncker, 1945). Participants are handed a box of tacks, a candle, and a box of matches and are challenged to attach the candle to a corkboard wall without wax dripping on the floor. These studies are generally believed to measure processes related to aspects of creativity, such as flexibility, originality, and the ability to identify unexpected relations between stimuli (Isen, Daubman, & Nowicki, 1987; Kaufmann, 2003; Kaufmann & Vosburg, 2002; Vosburg, 1998a, 1998b). Various theories have been offered to explain the beneficial effects of positive mood on creative problem solving tasks. It has been suggested that positive mood “cues” a wide variety of material and subsequently affects how it is organized in working memory (Isen, 1984, 1987, 1993; Isen & Daubman,

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1984; Isen et al., 1985). Material is then better connected and integrated in memory (Isen, 1984, 1987). The likelihood of making novel connections and of recombining stimuli in original ways increases in such a cognitive context (i.e., Isen & Daubman, 1984). Another perspective is that positive mood participants are more likely to regard the environment as safe, which fosters a more relaxed and exploratory approach to the task (Clore, Schwarz, & Conway, 1994). An additional possibility is that material encoded by positive mood participants is colored by their mood, meaning that metaphoric dimensions of words can become more salient (Isen & Daubman, 1984). Although a large number of studies support the view that positive affect promotes aspects of creativity, there are studies supporting the opposite position as well. One such study on analogical problem solving (Jauˇsovec, 1989) observed whether participants previously exposed to a problem and its solution could transfer this knowledge to solve a similar problem. Positive mood participants showed an advantage over other moods in one task. However, positive affect was detrimental to performance on another task very similar to the one used by Isen and colleagues (1987) in a study supporting the facilitative effects of positive mood. Likewise, positive affect did not promote a superior performance on syllogism tasks or on problem-solving tests (Melton, 1995). Another study examined the effects of positive, negative, and neutral moods on creative problem solving and found that negative mood participants outperformed neutral, control, and positive mood participants, in that order (Kaufmann & Vosburg, 1997). To reconcile these findings, it is important to consider that in the study by Isen and colleagues (1987), participants were manipulating physical objects (such as a box of tacks, a candle, and a box of matches) and could therefore easily monitor their own progress (Vosburg, 1998a). In contrast, in the Kaufmann and Vosburg study (1997), participants worked on a paper-and-pencil task (problem finding and problem solving) so that their progress could not be monitored as easily (Vosburg, 1998a). Likewise, in yet another study, positive mood participants generated more ideas than other participants in problem solving, problem finding, and creativity tasks (Vosburg, 1998b). However, their ideas were not deemed original or useful, whereas negative mood participants did not generate many ideas but theirs were of a better quality (Vosburg, 1998b). It seems that positive mood promotes creative problem solving under high satisficing conditions (generating a high number of solutions), whereas negative mood may facilitate task performance for more restrictive and optimizing requirements (generating fewer and yet superior ideas in terms of quality; Kaufmann & Vosburg, 1997; Vosburg, 1998b). In support of this contention, Weisberg (1994) examined the career of composer Robert Schumann to determine whether the work that he composed during highly productive hypomanic periods were of a higher quality than music composed during nonmanic phases. He found productivity to be unrelated to the quality of the

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music composed. It seems then that an abundance of ideas does not necessarily mean that these ideas are going to be good (Vosburg, 1998b). An additional position is that negative mood is likely to prompt reactions such as rejection of conventional approaches and solutions (Kaufmann & Vosburg, 2002). These very processes are central to creative problem solving (Kaufmann, 1993). In addition, negative affect appears to facilitate problem finding, a necessary prerequisite to problem solving (Runco, 1994) and a central component of creativity itself (i.e., Getzels & Csikszentmihalyi, 1976). Indeed, suicidal thoughts, a clear marker of negative mood, were found to be strongly related to the ability to invent original and interesting problems to solve (Mraz & Runco, 1994). EFFECT OF WRITING ON MOOD

As reviewed earlier in the chapter, both positive and negative mood may enhance performance on creative problem-solving tasks. Creativity also affects mood and, in the case of writing, mostly positively. Indeed, a wide variety of participants writing about a wide variety of topics have demonstrated that writing has a positive effect on mood. One set of studies examined writers’ change of mood from before to after writing. College student participants were asked to write emotional essays (Brand & Powell, 1986), emotionally neutral papers, and research drafts (Brand & House, 1987), whereas professional writers were instructed to complete mood inventories when writing for their work (Brand & Leckie, 1988). All the participants’ mood improved overall: Positive emotions were intensified and negative emotions blunted, regardless of the type of writing task. However, college students reported more positive attitudes toward writing when engaged in class assignments than when writing for themselves, except when writing research papers. In addition, students who considered themselves skilled writers and those who usually wrote on their own reported the least intensity and frequency of emotions. The overall mood of professional writers remained stable; there was no significant change in their mood from before to after writing. However, they did report overall positive affect when writing. Other researchers examined participants’ responses to written selfdisclosure about trauma (see Chapter 16). In the typical study, participants were instructed to write about their “thoughts and feelings” about an emotional experience for as little as 15 minutes a day for 3 days. Their responses were then compared to those of individuals writing about a neutral topic (Pennebaker & Beall, 1986). Participants writing about trauma felt worse than controls immediately after writing (i.e., Pennebaker & Beall, 1986; Pennebaker, Colder, & Sharp, 1990; Pennebaker & Francis, 1996). However, this effect was temporary and typically dissipated rapidly (Pennebaker, 1997). Indeed, a metaanalysis of almost 150 randomized experiments (Frattaroli, 2006) revealed that,

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in the vast majority of cases, participants demonstrated physical and mental improvements on both objective and subjective (self-report-based) markers. For example, there was a reduction in the number of visits to health centers (Pennebaker & Beall, 1986), higher immune functioning (Petrie, Booth, Pennebaker, Davison, & Thomas, 1995), decreased absenteeism (Francis & Pennebaker, 1992), and improved grade point average (Cameron & Nicholls, 1998). These findings seem to apply to a wide range of participants regardless of gender (Pennebaker & Beall, 1986), culture (Dominguez et al., 1995; Rim´e, 1995), social class (Bradley & Follingstad, 2003; Spera, Buhrfeind, & Pennebaker, 1994), and personality type (Cameron & Nicholls, 1998). In addition, age groups ranging from adolescents (O’Heeron, 1993) to nursing home residents (Caplan, 2000), health status ranging from healthy college students (Pennebaker et al., 1990) to cancer survivors (Low, Stanton, & Danoff-Burg, 2006), as well as prisoners in psychiatric hospitals (Richards, Beal, & Seagal, 2000) and rape victims (Brown & Heimberg, 2001) all benefited from the writing paradigm. To benefit from writing, participants do not need to write about their own experiences nor do they have to write about traumas: Participants instructed to write about an imaginary trauma (Greenberg, Wortman, & Stone, 1996), positive aspects of a trauma (King & Miner, 2000), thoughts and feelings about entering college (Cameron & Nicholls, 1998), being laid off (Spera, Buhrfeind, & Pennebaker, 1994), positive experiences (Burton & King, 2004), life goals (King, 2001), and one’s best possible future self (King, 2001; King & Miner, 2000) all showed beneficiary outcomes comparable to those experienced by participants writing about traumatic events. It thus appears that it is the exploration of thoughts and feelings associated with an experience (Pennebaker & Beall, 1986) and writing about topics that could potentially enhance self-regulation (including affective regulation) (Greenberg et al., 1996; King & Miner, 2000) that result in mood and health improvements. Indeed, affective regulation involves facing a negative emotion and successfully surmounting it (Greenberg et al., 1996). Writing allows participants the opportunity to improve their ability to distance themselves from such emotions and eventually master their emotional reactions, regardless of how the reactions were triggered. By gaining such a sense of control, participants ultimately learn about themselves (King & Miner, 2000). This is not to say that any type of writing is beneficial, because participants instructed to write about neutral topics do not experience the positive effects of writing (Pennebaker & Beall, 1986). What appears to be important is that the topic triggers an emotional reaction, positive or negative (Greenberg et al., 1996). In fact, participants instructed to avoid emotional content altogether or to provide strictly factual descriptions do not experience the positive effects of writing (Pennebaker & Beall, 1986).

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In addition, participants need to be able to structure their thoughts into a coherent story. Merely listing traumatic events is not enough (Smyth, True, & Souto, 2001). Indeed, people whose writing evolved from a disorganized description to a coherent story benefited from the writing experience (Pennebaker, 1993). Conversely, those whose stories were coherent from the beginning did not experience the positive effects of writing (Meichenbaum & Fong, 1993). Furthermore, the formation of a narrative is believed to be pivotal for writing to be beneficial (Pennebaker & Seagal, 1999). An analysis of the words used in participants’ writing about trauma revealed that when emotional expressions are controlled for, an increase in the use of insight words (e.g., understand, realize, thought, knew), causal words (e.g., because, reason, why), and more positive emotion words as compared to negative ones resulted in better health (Pennebaker, Mayne, & Francis, 1997). What it is exactly about a narrative that is beneficial is not clearly understood, but there are many possible explanations (i.e., Kaufman & Sexton, 2006; Pennebaker, 2004; Pennebaker & Graybael, 2001; Sloan & Marx, 2004). Repressing a traumatic event has been linked to stress-related disorders, whereas disclosing a trauma in writing seems beneficial (Pennebaker, 1994). Furthermore, writing narratives seems to foster self-knowledge and provides insight (Cameron & Nicholls, 1998) so that participants are able to assimilate and give meaning to their experience (Pennebaker & Beall, 1986). The transformation of a text into a story is often marked by a perspective shift: Indeed, participants who wrote from the first-person perspective and then switched to the third person reported feeling better than those who continued to use the first person (Stirman & Pennebaker, 2001). It is also possible that once an experience is transformed into a story, it becomes simpler and more manageable and can be assimilated more readily, thus allowing the individual to move beyond the traumatic experience (Pennebaker & Seagal, 1999; Spera et al., 1994). In addition, when events are visited and revisited time and time again in writing, the emotional response to the events becomes dulled (Pennebaker & Seagal, 1999). Participants who benefited the most from writing are those who wrote the most intensely, for the longest amount of time (P´aez, Velasco, & Gonz´alez, 1999), and over the longest time span (Smyth, 1998). Although writing introspectively can be beneficial to mood, it is also plausible that very intense introspection can be harmful. It is possible that poetry writing, because it presumably calls for greater introspection, can leave a poet feeling worse after the act of writing (Kaufman, 2002; Kaufman & Sexton, 2006; see Chapter 2). THE STUDY

Up to this point, I have contended that there is a relationship between bipolar disorder and creative writing. I then argued that mood disorders and normal

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mood variations exist on a continuum, which makes tenable the idea of a link between higher than average mood variability and creative writing. There is very little research linking subclinical mood variability and creative writing. Because of this dearth of research, I first reviewed the effect of mood on creativity and then reviewed the effect of writing (not necessarily creative) on mood. From this review, two hypotheses emerged. I expected creative writers (writers of fiction, plays, screenplays, and poetry) to exhibit more mood variability when compared to nonfiction writers (in the present case, journalists) because the research linking manic depression and writing concerns exclusively creative writers (variability hypothesis). In addition, both groups should exhibit greater mood variability than individuals who do not write (nonwriters). Further, I hypothesized that the act of writing would affect writers positively, heightening their experience of valence (experience of pleasure/displeasure) and lowering arousal (feeling of activation/deactivation). Creative writers should exhibit these changes more markedly than journalists because creative writing can potentially elicit the type of writing that Pennebaker and colleagues (1986–2008) have associated with an improved sense of well-being. The participants were all college students; among them were 20 creative writers, 20 journalists, and 20 nonwriters (controls), with an equal number of males and females. Six creative writers wrote exclusively prose (novels, short stories, screenplays, plays), three wrote exclusively poetry, and the rest wrote a combination of prose and poetry. Among the journalists were five reporters, three editors, six sportswriters, three columnists, two who wrote about the economy, and one who wrote about the arts and entertainment. The demographics of the study reflected that of the college the students were attending. To test the variability and regulation hypotheses, I used the method of experience sampling. Experience sampling provides a mean of investigating subjective experience (Reis & Gable, 2000). Typically, participants are asked to fill out a predetermined number of mood scales as they go about their days for specific periods of time (i.e., Kernis, Cornell, Sun, Berry, & Harlow, 1993). Such mood reports permit the calculation of mood variability (i.e., Penner, Shiffman, Paty, & Fritzsche, 1994). Experience sampling can also be used to study how particular events affect participants’ mood (i.e., Knee, Patrick, Vietor, & Neighbors, 2004). The change in the pre- and postwriting mood scales can then be examined to determine how writing affects mood (i.e., Brand & Powell, 1986). To capture mood variability, participants were asked to record their emotions at the moment of rating on an 8-point Likert type scale for 26 mood adjectives three times a day for 14 days. To see the effect of writing on their mood, they were asked to fill out the mood scales immediately before and immediately after writing for 10 times that they wrote.

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People’s representations of their emotional experiences can be depicted in the shape of a circle composed of two main dimensions, valence and arousal (Feldman Barrett & Fossum, 2001). I chose 16 mood adjectives because they captured the full spectrum of this affective circumplex: enthusiastic, peppy, happy, satisfied, calm, relaxed, quiet, still, sleepy, sluggish, sad, disappointed, nervous, afraid, surprised, and aroused (Feldman, 1995). I took the other adjectives from the Positive Affect Negative Affect Schedule-Expanded Form (PANAS-X; Watson & Clark, 1994). These adjectives measure Happiness (happy, delighted, joyful, cheerful) and Sadness (sad, blue, downhearted, alone, lonely). Four more adjectives were used because they measure Enthusiasm (enthusiastic, excited, lively, and energetic; Feldman Barrett, 1998). The variability hypothesis stated that creative writers would exhibit more mood variability than either journalists or controls. After statistical analyses, creative writers as well as journalists were found to have lower mood variability than nonwriters. In addition, there was no significant difference between creative writers and journalists. This finding suggests that, for these student writers, there is no association between regularly engaging in creative writing and higher mood variability. One possible explanation is that the regulation hypothesis invalidated the variability hypothesis, meaning that for the creative writers and journalists, writing may have acted as a mood regulator, leveling mood variability. Further, it could have acted as a protective factor. Perhaps when mood variability is within the normal range, it can be assuaged by writing. Further, it has been suggested that creativity is central to mental health (i.e., Csikszentmihalyi, 1990; Maslow, 1968; Richards, 1990; Rogers, 1959). It is possible that the relationship between creativity and mental health is mediated by the “level of expertise of the writer” so that professional (eminent) writers may very well have “habituated” to writing and it is no longer beneficial to them (Runco, 1998, p. 644). On the other hand, apprentice writers fully enjoy the benefits of writing (Runco, 1998). The absence of a difference between creative writers and journalists is possibly because journalism also elicits self-disclosure. Runco (1994) contended that creative writing facilitates self-disclosure because the writer is incited to find a problem, propose a solution, and then examine the consequences of implementing such a solution. This reasoning can very well be applied to journalistic writing: Instead of a personal or emotional problem, the apprentice journalist is more likely to tackle society’s problem. In addition, journalists are often linking their thoughts about the events to their feelings and reactions to it, a practice very similar to the one attributed to Pennebaker’s participants. Pennebaker also mentioned the importance of the writing moving from a disorganized state to an organized state in enabling the writer to feel better. Editing is a process through which the writing undergoes such a process, especially for those who write for an audience.

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The regulation hypothesis was partly supported: The act of writing increased positive valence (writers reported feeling happier, more satisfied, more delighted, more joyful) and lowered arousal (participants reported feeling calmer, less nervous, more relaxed and enthusiastic). These findings add to the body of work delineating the benefits of writing outlined earlier and described by Pennebaker and colleagues (1986–2008). In addition, given that participants’ writing was not collected and that they were not asked to indicate the genre and topic of their writing when filling out the writing forms, it seems that, for this group of writers, it is the mere act of writing that is beneficial. Indeed, many student writers ultimately want to go on and become “real” journalists and “real” writers. As one participant explained, “I want to become a journalist, so the more I write, the better I write, and the better I feel about myself.” It is plausible that for these participants, writing is beneficial regardless of the topic because all writing can be seen as contributing to their professional development. They are exercising their chosen craft. Moreover, by writing, participants are exercising self-regulation in that they have set goals and are actively pursuing them, thus moving closer to their desired outcome, which overall contributes to an improved mood and sense of well-being (King, 2002). Interestingly, journalists reported more satisfaction after writing than did creative writers. Perhaps creative writers are harder on themselves, and because journalists work on a deadline, it is possible that they feel relieved to have finished on time. Their projects are also clearly defined, and they get immediate feedback from other journalists and readers. Further, all the pieces that they work on are commissioned, published, and have an audience. Creative writers’ pieces are not all published; in fact, only a few are. Additionally, journalists probably have a stronger sense of agency in that they are reacting to events by telling their readers what they think about those occurrences. Indeed, for one journalist, writing is about “responding to the world and contributing to the community.” Perhaps creative writers are somehow frustrated by their lack of immediate gratification and by having fewer opportunities to receive feedback (Kaun, 1991). In addition to completing mood scales, participants were also asked to write their thoughts about the effect of writing on mood (does writing influence your mood?1 ) and the effect of mood on writing (what mood are you typically in when you write?). I was interested in the subjective experience of participants, in the meaning that they made out of their experience (Bruner, 1990; Denzin & Lincoln, 2000) as budding writers. Overall, participants’ theories expressed in response to the question, “how does writing affect your mood,” are reflected by the mood change captured by the mood scales. Indeed, almost all journalists and all creative writers reported 1

The questions between parentheses were the actual questions presented to the participants.

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that writing elevated their mood, and more than half reported a decrease in arousal on both scales and stated theory (feeling calmer, serene, peaceful). As one journalist explained, “It’s just something about the creative process of being able to put words to paper that makes me feel good.” Writers reported that writing made them feel creative, inspired, and imaginative. Participants also reported that writing helped them understand their thoughts and emotions. It helped them gain “insight.” Journalists reflected that writing helped them structure and organize their ideas so that their thoughts could be fully developed and explored and could reach their “natural conclusion.” They were able to focus on a specific topic in a methodical way, which made the events they described more manageable. Thus, writing “clarified [their] thinking.” However, no journalist reported the therapeutic and cathartic effect of writing, which creative writers did. One poet described writing as the “only time when I am completely honest with myself.” In addition, creative writers reported being completely immersed by their writing; at such times they were in what Csikszentmihalyi (1990) called “flow,” which has been described as the suspension of time, transcendence of self, and oblivion to the surroundings. One creative writer reflected, “[One gets] completely absorbed [in it] and enters another world.” For the next question, “what mood are you typically in when you write,” participants reported almost opposite moods. Some creative writers and journalists reported feeling pensive and absorbed, a state that one described as “almost like meditation.” Others described high energy and excitement because they regard writing as highly enjoyable, and “can’t wait to get started.” Creative writers as well as journalists reflected that their mood very much depended on how satisfied they were with their writing. These apprentice writers seem to know themselves well and to be very attuned to the role and the effect of writing in their lives. It is possibly by writing that they reached this high level of self-knowledge. An alternative explanation would be that writers’ theories about the effect of writing on mood drove their answers on the scales. For example, writers who believed that writing made them happy might automatically report positive emotions without introspecting at all. Conversely, those who held the belief that writing made them feel worse might fill out the scales according to these beliefs. Thus, it seems that the relationship between manic depression and creative writing as it applies to distinguished novelists such as Woolf, Hemingway, Plath, and others does not extrapolate to a relationship between mood variability and writing in student writers. It is perhaps precisely because they are writing that participants’ mood is more stable than that of controls. These findings do concur with earlier research that concluded that, after writing, participants overall feel better, less negative, and more positive (i.e., Brand & House, 1987; Pennebaker & Beall, 1986). Moreover, the study also suggests that, for these aspiring writers, it is the act of writing itself that seems to be beneficial and not

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4 Characteristics of Eminent Screenwriters: Who Are Those Guys? steven r. pritzker and david jung mc garva

“Who are those guys?” was a line spoken repeatedly by Paul Newman in Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (Goldman, 1969, p. 80) as a posse followed them. It is an apt description of the notoriety of screenwriters who have, for the most part, remained out of the limelight with no posses or paparazzi following them. There is a considerable amount of research investigating the characteristics of eminent writers, including poets, fiction writers, and nonfiction writers. However, we were able to locate very little research employing a psychological perspective regarding the characteristics of screenwriters. This chapter reviews information concerning Academy Award winning screenwriters from 1927–2007, from both a quantitative and qualitative approach. We compiled statistics on screenwriters regarding age of winning the award, longevity, gender, and nationality. By reviewing interviews with Oscarwriting screenwriters, we gathered information on qualitative themes, including experiences growing up, work experience before becoming screenwriters, motivation, work habits, writing, rewriting, collaboration, and experiences in the film business. A BRIEF HISTORY OF SCREENWRITERS

It is important to look at screenwriters from a historical perspective because the film industry is a unique environment. A brief three-word description of the general attitude toward movie writers is provided by the title of an old movie: They Were Expendable. This attitude dates to the early days of silent films when Mack Sennett gained fame by locking his writers in a room until they came up with acceptable stories. A few screenwriters earned substantial sums, but they were the exceptions. For example, Anita Loos started selling stories to D. W. Griffith for $25 each and ended up becoming a highly paid star writer when her scenarios helped turn Douglas Fairbanks into a star. Similarly, her friend Frances Marion parlayed her success writing Mary Pickford movies into a $50,000 a year 57

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contract with Paramount (Norman, 2007). Marion later earned two Oscars (The Champ, The Big House) in 4 years. However, the majority of writers were warehoused in studios in places similar to what John Cromwell described at Paramount in 1930: “a barracklike building – long halls, little cubby holes, typewriters clacking away behind doors” (Wilk, 2004, p. 27). Many writers punched time clocks. They worked on whatever scripts the studio assigned them and most of the time did not complete the story they were assigned. Most writers were considered interchangeable: Milton Sperling said that many producers kept in their offices a goosing stick, which looked and functioned something like a cattle prod, and they found it amusing to use it on writers. “The cruelty,” he remembered, “was intensified by the way people played along. The stakes were so big that many people submitted to humiliation.” (Schwartz & Schwartz, 1982, p. 20)

Even if that story is apocryphal, it captures the essence of a relationship in which many writers were powerless. Jack L. Warner “enjoyed referring to his cadre of writers as ‘schmucks with Underwoods’” (Wilk, 2004, p. XII). The producer Irving Thalberg used teams of writers on the same project because he saw himself as the driving creative force: “I, more than any single person in Hollywood, have my finger on the pulse of America. I know what people will do and what they won’t do” (Dardis, 1976, p. 44). I. A. L. Diamond (The Apartment) recalled that “the major studios operated on the principle that the more writers on a script, the better it was going to be” (Froug, 1972, p. 149). Who received writing credits on movies was determined by production companies. Carl Laemmle (who wanted to be called Uncle Carl) of Universal Studios gave his family members credit, leading Ogden Nash, a humorous poet, to write, “Uncle Carl Laemmle/has a very large faemmle” (Schwartz & Schwartz, 1982, p. 8). However, Hollywood producers, beginning as early as Samuel Goldwyn in 1919, did go after big name literary and stage writers. Big name writers signed by the studios in Hollywood in the 1930s included Scott Fitzgerald, Dorothy Parker, S. J. Perelman, Aldous Huxley, Robert Benchley, Marc Connelly, John Dos Passos, Nathanael West, John O’Hara, Damon Runyon, Evelyn Waugh, and William Faulkner. “Even Sigmund Freud had been contacted by Samuel Goldwyn about coming to Hollywood to write a script about psychoanalysis” (Schwartz & Schwartz, 1982, p. 20). However, fame in other arenas did not necessarily translate into success in writing movies. Bitterness about Hollywood experiences was expressed in many novels including Scott Fitzgerald’s The Last Tycoon and Nathanael West’s Day of the Locust. The shabby treatment of the majority of Hollywood writers and of many other workers in the film industry led to union organizing activity in the early

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1930s. Studio heads founded the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences in 1928 to preempt unions from forming and to serve as a central organization with which they could control players in the industry. In 1933, a wage cut that the studio heads said was justified by the Depression led to a strike by union soundmen and the formation of the Screenwriters Guild, which eventually became the Writers Guild of America (Schwartz & Schwartz, 1982). Yet no minimum wage agreements were put in place until 1942 (Norman, 2007). This history is important to understand because it highlights the thread of powerlessness that runs through much of the discussion with many Hollywood writers, even the ones at the top of the profession. For example, “Donald Ogden Stewart said that at formal dinners one was seated according to importance at the box office. Writers, if invited at all, sat at the bottom of the table, below the heads of publicity but above the hairdressers” (Schwartz & Schwartz, 1982, p. 19). Writers under contract to the studios often had their own table in the commissary where they enjoyed each other’s companionship. Julius Epstein (Casablanca) remembered, “It was a real club; that was the fun of it. There were 70 to 75 writers at Warners, 125 at Metro. . . . Only the writers could sit at the writers’ table” (McGilligan, 1986, p. 178). Over the years, the studio system has been weakened so that most writers today work on a project-to-project basis. A few writer-directors have gained the power to have their work produced with a minimum of interference. However, most screenwriters are still faced with the challenge of responding to a variety of other parties, including studio executives, company executives, directors, and actors. A script may go through a number of rewrites as the players change. Ted Tally (Silence of The Lambs) summed up the challenge: It’s not fun unless it gets made. And unless it gets made, you’re not going to feel legitimized. An unproduced script is not publishable. . . . A film script is only good for one thing. Otherwise it’s dead. And in many cases you don’t even own it. (Engel, 1995, p. 109)

John Briley (Gandhi) stated the situation bluntly: Writers are not the lowest of the low (“the aspiring starlet who was so dumb she screwed the writer”) because people don’t want good scripts. It’s because they are, unlike all their other professional colleagues, utterly powerless. Powerless to protect their material, powerless even to really argue its merits. (Elbert, 1999, p. 134)

The perception in Hollywood of writers has not changed. Speaking about contract negotiations, Garrett (2007) reported in Daily Variety, “Film scribes are caught in a double whammy as strike deadlines approach: Collectively, they are generally less powerful than their actor and director counterparts” (p. 1). This lack of power was proven out in the resulting strike when the

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Writers Guild was only able to make a settlement after the Directors Guild had made an agreement with production companies regarding payments for TV shows and movies distributed on the Internet. The 4 1/2-month strike resulted in relatively small payments for writers whose work is written for the Internet or for shows and movies later distributed on the Internet. Because the Internet is viewed as a key future means of distribution, the deal was hailed as a triumph by the leaders of the Writers Guild with major financial benefits for the future. The well-documented lack of respect for writers contrasts sharply with the findings of Simonton (2004), who analyzed award-winning movies in an attempt to measure the relative importance of different elements to film making. He concluded, “Screenwriting joins direction in constituting the two most critical predictors of a movie’s success.” He added, “Ultimately, a great film must tell a great story. This provides a link between filmmaking creativity and the creativity displayed in literature; especially in drama. . . . Many notable motion pictures are in fact adapted from successful novels and plays” (p. 170). OUR STUDY

Our study focused on the 215 Academy Award winning screenwriters in any writing category from the first Academy Awards in 1927/28 through 2007. An example of the lack of general interest in screenwriters is the paucity of published biographical data about them. The only biographical item available for every writer who won an Oscar was his or her date of death. We accepted the dates listed in the Academy’s own database as authoritative even when we found alternative dates. The Academy does not publish dates of birth. We drew these from standard reference books, professionally edited Web sites, and obituaries. One date of birth came from a gravestone. For several writers it was difficult to find dates of birth, and it became clear that a few had made the choice to keep their ages private. We were successful in tracking down dates for 211 of the 215 writers. Some of the data were provided through statistical calculations, including median age at which writers won the award and the median age of death. Other categories calculated include the percentage of women, minorities, and nonEnglish-speaking writers who won. We also looked at how many individuals won more than one award and the number of winning writer-directors. The use of Academy Award winners as the standard might be questioned because studios have been accused of manipulating the awards. However, Simonton (2002) found that the Academy Award provided the most reliable predictor of quality both in relation to other awards, especially those of the Writers Guild of America, and to future movie guide ratings. Writers were selected for inclusion based on the availability of archival material including published interviews, biographies, and autobiographical

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books and articles. Because of the increased interest in screenwriters during the last 30 years, the majority of the writers who were included worked after 1950. A conscious effort was made to avoid choosing a preponderance of writer-directors. We reviewed the information and interviews of 101 writers (Appendix A), examining aspects such as early childhood experiences, education, number of marriages, and number of children. Both authors read the written materials and coded themes of importance: experiences growing up, work experience before becoming screenwriters, motivation, work habits, writing, rewriting, collaboration, and reflections about the experience of being in the movie business. EARLY LIFE HISTORY

The difficult early years of award-winning writer-director Preston Sturges (The Great McGinty) are illustrative of many writers’ experiences. He was 8 years old when his mother decided to move to Paris with Preston while his father, a millionaire named Solomon Sturges, remained in Chicago. Preston wanted to stay with Solomon, but he told him, “I am not your father” (Spoto, 1990, p. 20). Preston grew up primarily raised by his mother, who was married at least four times in addition to cultivating a number of younger lovers. She was also a writer of sorts who managed to publish a poorly written book about her friendship with Isadora Duncan. Preston’s life as a young man involved moving from city to city without really developing any deep emotional ties or a profession. He finally landed a job as a stage manager and soon after, at age 29, he wrote his first play, The Guinea Pig, and then Strictly Dishonorable, which became a big hit that was eventually filmed. He then wrote three failed plays before moving to Hollywood where his script of The Power and The Glory made him a star writer. He eventually wrote and directed a number of films that became classics. Sturges illustrates Rothenberg’s and Wyshak’s (2004) thesis that exceptional creative talents are often completing the unfulfilled wishes of one of their parents who didn’t have success in the same or a similar field. Research on the lives of 160 exceptional creative fiction writers (Piirto, 2002) indicated an above-average difficulty in childhood including “orphanhood, parental disability, neglect, frequent moving, parental alcoholism, suicide of family members and other extraordinary childhood trauma” (p. 152). This may also be the case for eminent screenwriters. Examples of childhood difficulties experienced by screenwriters included early parental death or absence (Orson Welles, Billy Wilder, and John Huston), childhood illness (Francis Ford Coppola and Ronald Bass), parental divorce (Oliver Stone and Quentin Tarantino), family financial problems (Jane Campion, Billy Wilder, Richard Brooks, Dalton Trumbo, and Woody Allen), and becoming a refugee (Ruth

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Prawer Jhabvala). In contrast, some writers such as Joel and Ethan Coen stated they had ordinary childhoods. We did not have enough data to come to any conclusions regarding mental illness in family members or writers. However, some instances were reported; for example, Orson Welles’ (Citizen Kane) brother waged a lifelong struggle with mental illness. One interesting story related to three-time winner Sidney Aaron Chayefsky (Marty, The Hospital, Network), who, according to Considine (2000), developed an alter ego. Sidney pretended to have an Irish mother while he was in the Army because he wanted to avoid KP duty; his lieutenant gave him the nickname “Paddy.” “Paddy” Chayefsky became a very different person from Sidney. He started eating bacon, which violated his Jewish tenets. Sidney Chayefsky would not have done such a thing. Sidney Chayefsky rarely swore, but for Paddy Chayefsky, “obscenity soon became a second language Paddy created to protect Sidney from his rage and just as he used his words, to protect him from other people” (p. 19). Paddy was the name Chayefsky used as a professional writer. In 1980, when Chayefsky wanted to disown the film of his script for Altered States, he used the name Sidney Aaron (Norman, 2007). Education Some writers such as William Goldman (Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, All the President’s Men) reported that they showed no particular talent for writing while younger. Tom Schulman (Dead Poet’s Society) recalled, “As a kid I was a terrible writer. I was inarticulate and made C’s on my writing papers, until I transferred schools in the tenth grade” (Engel, 2002, pp. 102–103). Robert Benton (Kramer vs. Kramer, Places in The Heart) was dyslexic so his father took him to a lot of movies. Notable high school dropouts include twotime winners Alvin Sargent (Julia, Ordinary People) and Quentin Tarantino (Pulp Fiction). However, the majority of writers we reviewed (24 of 32 or 75%) had at least some college education. Oscar winners who attended film school include Alexander Payne (Sideways), Eric Roth (Forrest Gump), and Francis Ford Coppola (Patton, The Godfather, The Godfather 2). Jane Campion (The Piano) was an assistant to a director of commercials and documentaries before studying at Australian Film, Television and Radio School. Marriage and Children We found the mean number of marriages to be 2.1. In a random sample of 36, only one writer never married and he is openly gay. However, that result may be biased because it only includes writers whose interviewers and biographers

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mentioned spouses. The writer who won the award for the most marriages was Alan Jay Lerner (An American in Paris, Gigi) with eight wives. Edward Anhalt (Panic in the Streets, Beckett), John Huston (The Treasure of the Sierra Madre), and William A. Wellman (A Star is Born) were each married five times. Only two writers of a random sample of 34 were childless, with a mean of 2.9 children per writer. THE CAREER PATHS TO BECOMING A SCREENWRITER

That any individual ever actually thinks he or she can make a living becoming a writer requires a tremendous act of faith. William Goldman wrote about how skeptical people would be when, after graduating from college, he told them he wanted to be a writer. He also had to fight his own self-doubt: We have hope but we also know the odds against us. Failure keeps us company. And that’s the only company we have. Because nobody is going to do it for you. We have tunes in our head, but what if they stink? We have color and composition dancing behind our eyes, but what if no one cares? (1983, p. 84)

Billy Wilder (The Lost Weekend, Sunset Boulevard, The Apartment) summed up the challenge of becoming a successful screenwriter this way: If the truth be told, language barrier or not, refugees or not, very few people in general make it here, writing scripts. Whether you were born in Dresden or in Oklahoma – just look at the percentage of writers who have actually made it here as a screenwriter, against the percentage of those who’ve come out here and failed! Expert writers from the New York theatre . . . English authors and playwrights . . . novelists who wrote best sellers . . . guys who’ve had their stories published in magazines. Very few of them ever made it. . . . Motion picture writing is a profession in itself. It is a very difficult medium: you cannot just sit down and write a screenplay. . . . In order to write a successful screenplay, you have to have gone through some kind of engineering school. Most of those people . . . even the graduates of film schools, they were just writers. (Wilk, 2004, pp. 157–158)

We identified seven paths to becoming a screenwriter – journalism, play writing, novel writing, television writing, film school and screenwriting as the only profession, other show business occupations, and unrelated careers. The fact that screenwriters come to the field from so many different types of work is significant because, as Billy Wilder suggested, there may be a unique ability to construct a screenplay that is impossible to predict based on the ability to do other forms of writing. Some Oscar-winning writers did most of their work

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in other fields. Examples include novelist John Irving and playwright George Bernard Shaw. Journalism The pressure of deadlines inherent in journalism gave newspaper writers an advantage in the fast-paced world of early film-making. Ben Hecht (Underworld, The Scoundrel) and Charles MacArthur (The Scoundrel) were journalists, as were Herman J. Mankiewicz (Citizen Kane) and his brother Joseph Mankiewicz (A Letter to Three Wives, All about Eve). Additional journalists included Dalton Trumbo (Roman Holiday, The Brave One), Norman Krasna (Princes O’Rourke), S. J. Perelman (Around the World in 80 Days), Jeremy Larner (The Candidate), and Frank Pierson (Dog Day Afternoon). The newspaperman as hero was a common theme in the 1930s, but its frequency lessened over time as journalism became a less common background for screenwriters. A contemporary example of a journalist-turned screenwriter is Cameron Crowe who won an award for Almost Famous, which was inspired by his experiences writing for Rolling Stone magazine when he was only 16. Playwrights As mentioned earlier, success in the theater often led to an opportunity to write screenplays. A number of playwrights ended up winning Academy Awards, including George Bernard Shaw (Pygmalion), Orson Welles (Citizen Kane), William Inge (Splendor in the Grass), Tom Stoppard (Shakespeare in Love), Steve Tesich (Breaking Away), John Patrick Shanley (Moonstruck), Alfred Uhry (Driving Miss Daisy), and double winners Alan Jay Lerner (An American in Paris, My Fair Lady) and Robert Bolt (Dr. Zhivago, A Man for All Seasons). Television Writing Television has provided training for writers since the 1950s. Paddy Chayefsky’s award-winning original script for Marty was originally performed on TV. He went on to win additional awards for The Hospital and Network, a parody of the television business. Bo Goldman (One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, Melvin and Howard) wrote and produced several shows on PBS in the 1970s. Mel Brooks (The Producers) was a comic in the Catskills where he met Sid Caesar. He became a writer on The Show of Shows and continued working for Caesar on various TV shows for 10 years. After selling jokes since he was 16, Woody Allen (Annie Hall, Hannah and Her Sisters) became a junior writer on some Caesar TV specials (Parish, 2007). He then started doing his own standup comedy act. Marshall Brickman (Annie Hall) was a professional musician who then started writing for Candid Camera and The Tonight Show.

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Situation comedy writing was the proving ground for James L. Brooks (Terms of Endearment), who created Room 222 and co-created The Mary Tyler Moore Show, Rhoda, Taxi, and The Simpsons. Paul Haggis (Crash, Million Dollar Baby) worked on The Facts of Life and created Walker, Texas Ranger, and EZ Streets. Charlie Kaufman (The Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind) wrote 30 episodes of situation comedies, including Get a Life! Novelists Writing a novel that was then optioned for a movie in Hollywood provided an opportunity for many screenwriters to start their careers. Charles Brackett (The Lost Weekend, Sunset Boulevard, Titanic) was a drama critic for The New Yorker and a novelist before he signed with Paramount. Frederic Raphael (Darling), William Goldman, Mario Puzo (The Godfather, The Godfather, Part II), Ruth Prawer Jhabvala (A Room with a View, Howard’s End), John Irving (The Cider House Rules), and Neil Jordan (The Crying Game) all published novels before they wrote screenplays. Film School and Screenwriting as a First Career There is a growing trend in the film industry of students who attended film schools, such as University of California at Los Angeles, University of Southern California, and New York University, then becoming major writers, directors, and producers. Other screenwriters went right into the film business. Peter Jackson (Lord of The Rings – Return of The King) started making movies on his own. I. A. L. Diamond was offered a job as a junior screenwriter right out of college. Other Show Business Occupations Many screenwriters started as actors: for example, Horton Foote (To Kill a Mockingbird, Tender Mercies) and Sofia Coppola (Lost in Translation). Edward Anhalt and Stephan Zallian (Schindler’s List) were film editors. Callie Khoury (Thelma and Louise) produced music videos. Sidney Buchman (Here Comes Mr. Jordan) started as an assistant stage director. Ronald Bass (Rain Man) was a Hollywood lawyer. Diablo Cody’s (Juno) blog about her career as a stripper led to her discovery and ultimately winning the big prize with her first script. Unrelated Fields Clearly becoming a successful writer or working in show business is the most prevalent way of getting into the business, but some winners became writers after doing unrelated work. Michael Kanin (Woman of the Year) was a

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Steven R. Pritzker and David Jung McGarva Table 4.1. Decade in which screenwriters won an Academy Award Number of award winners

Decade

66 84 30 5 1

30s 40s 50s 60s 80s

commercial and scenic artist. Quentin Tarantino (Pulp Fiction) worked in a video rental store, a job that gave him time to study a lot of films. Several lawyers became screenwriters, including Leo McCarey (Going My Way), Sonya Levien (Interrupted Melody), and Ronald Bass (Rain Man).

Summary Of a sample of 142 winners for whom data were available, we counted 32 journalists/reporters (18 having their first wins in the 1930s and 1940s, 9 in the 1950s and 1960s, and 5 since then), 19 actors (6 of them since 1995), and 8 lawyers (7 of them from 1955 or earlier).

AGE AT WINNING AN AWARD

Among 198 winners, age at the time of an award ranged from 25 to 82, with a mean of 42.3 and median of 42 (Appendix B). This is in line with the peak years of creative productivity that Simonton (1994) calculated for the arts. Table 4.1 shows the age spread. George Bernard Shaw is the exceptional individual who won at 82 for the 1938 adaptation of his play Pygmalion. Alan Jay Lerner later won in 1964 for the musical adaptation of Pygmalion, My Fair Lady. Ageism is perceived to be very powerful in the film business. Prejudice in favor of younger writers is perceived to be so extreme that some screenwriters have actually pretended to be much younger than they are. Froug (1996) reported, “The fear of growing older is endemic in the Hollywood scene. Among some of its denizens, it reaches panic proportions and induces serious breakdowns and dangerous depressions” (p. 324). He stated that writers dye their hair and have facelifts and tummy tucks to look younger. Some have taken on younger partners to help their image in meetings with studio heads. A portion of a lawsuit for age discrimination by older writers against the major studios, networks, and agents was settled in 2008 by two agencies for 4.5 million dollars.

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Given this bias, it is interesting to note that the age at which the award is first won, based on a moving average, went up in the last 10 years and is virtually at an all-time high of close to 50 after dipping to a low of under 40 in the 1990s. LIFE EXPECTANCY

The mean lifespan of a winner was 72 (see Appendix C). This places eminent screenwriters at the top range of life expectancy in line with composers and painters. It also places them much higher on the scale than most writers, despite screenwriters’ complaints about the difficulty of their work. Kaufman (2003) examined the lifespans of novelists, poets, playwrights, and nonfiction writers in the United States and elsewhere. The mean lifespan for American writers was 68.9 years, with only the novelists living longer at 72.7 years. The fact that screenwriters make a very good living is in keeping with the general trend of higher-earning people living longer. However, it is worth noting that the life expectancy of screenwriters is declining in contrast to the rise in the general population. From 1940 to 1950 the moving average was close to the mid-70s, whereas in the late 1970s it dipped below 70 and has remained there. Winners who are still living at the time of this writing average 62 years old. Only one winner, with the exception of the blacklisted writers in the 1950s, received his award posthumously. In 1939, Sidney Howard (Gone with the Wind) died in an accident before receiving his Oscar. After winning their award, screenwriters have survived for periods of from less than 2 years – Joseph Farnham, the first-ever winner for Title Writing in 1927/28, Pierre Collings (The Story of Louis Pasteur), and Claudine West (Mrs. Miniver) – to almost 60 years: Cecil Lewis (Pygmalion) and Sidney Sheldon (The Bachelor and the Bobby-Soxer). VARIOUS CATEGORIES OF WINNERS

Repeat Winners Four individuals have won three Oscars each for writing. However, only one of them, Paddy Chayefsky, was a pure writer, not a writer-director or writerproducer. Billy Wilder was a writer-director on all of his awards, but co-wrote them with Charles Brackett and I. A. L. Diamond. Brackett won a third Oscar for The Titanic in 1956, which he wrote with two other writers. Francis Ford Coppola was a co-writer of one award-winning film and co-writer-director of both winning Godfather films. A total of 30 writers won two or more awards. Many of them were screenwriters only: for example, Frances Marion, Robert Bolt, Horton Foote,

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Bo Goldman, William Goldman, Ben Hecht, Ring Lardner Jr., Mario Puzo, Waldo Salt, Alvin Sargent, Dalton Trumbo, Michael Wilson, and Ruth Prawer Jhabvala. Writer-directors who won two awards included Woody Allen, Robert Benton, Joseph L. Mankiewicz, and the Coen brothers. It may, as nominees say, be a thrill just to be nominated. Sixty percent of winners were never nominated again. The two writers with the most nominations are Woody Allen (14) and Billy Wilder (12). Blacklisted Writers An astonishing fact is that four of these double winners (Lardner Jr., Salt, Trumbo, and Wilson) were blacklisted after they appeared before the House Un-American Activities Committee hearings that began in 1947. Trumbo and Lardner went to jail after taking the First Amendment and refusing to name others who had allegedly attended meetings of the Communist Party or Communist front organizations. Trumbo (Roman Holiday, The Brave One) wrote these films under assumed names. He eventually received his Oscar for The Brave One in 1975; the award for Roman Holiday was presented to his widow in 1993. Wilson wrote The Bridge on the River Kwai with Carl Foreman, another blacklisted writer. They also received posthumous Oscars in 1984. Women and Minority Writers The chapter title, “Who are those guys?” reflects the high percentage of male award winners. Twenty women have won a total of 22 awards, less than 10% of the total. These include double winners Frances Marion in the 1920s and Ruth Prawer Jhabvala in the 1980s, who account for four of the ten solo writing credits. Muriel Box (The Seventh Veil) and Edna Anhalt (Panic in the Streets) shared story-writing credits with their husbands. Pamela Wallace (Witness) was credited with the story with her husband Earl and William Kelley. All the other women writers received credits on films along with male writers. The percentage of female award winners has increased significantly over the past two decades. Since 1991, nine women won 19% of the awards, including Jane Campion and Sofia Coppola who also directed their movies. However, women now make up 24% of the membership of the Writers Guild so the percentage of female winners still is not proportional to the percentage in the guild, not to mention in the country. An increase in the number of female Hollywood production executives, including as heads of studios, may eventually help bring more women into key creative positions, but that is a slow process. In 2006, the percentage of women writers working in film was only 19%, the same figure as in 1999. The Writers Guild 2007 Hollywood Writers Report (Hunt, 2007) concluded, “Women writers have made no gains relative to

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male writers in recent years, and there is little evidence to suggest that this pattern is changing” (p. 21). Ironically, Robert Towne (Chinatown) commented; I think . . . that writers generally tend to identify with women, or even to identify themselves as women – particularly movie writers. I do. You are always the one at home sweating over the hot typewriter while the authority figure is out on the set, telling people what to do. (Brady, 1981, p. 370)

Minority and Non-English-Speaking Winners The number of minorities winning awards is not calculated anywhere, but we can say it is very small. Although some African American actors, musicians, and sound engineers have won awards, we could not locate one African American writer. The same is true for American Latinos. Nobody born in Asia is represented, although Ruth Prawer Jhabvala moved from Germany to India when she was 12. Now she lives both in the United States and India. Minority employment in film writing reported by the Writers Guild of America was only 6% in 2005 (Hunt, 2007). Minorities were proportionately underrepresented by 5 to 1. Latinos were underrepresented 9 to 1, Native Americans 5 to 1, African Americans 4 to 1, and Asians 3 to 1. Hunt summed up the loss caused by this lack of minority representation: “Industry diversity is not only about equal access to employment opportunities; it is also about opening spaces for the telling of stories that might not otherwise be told” (p. 51). Because there is a best foreign film category, rarely does a film in a foreign language cross over and win in the writing category. Some foreign-language films that won Academy awards for writing were The Red Balloon (Albert Lamorisse), which contained no dialogue; Divorce–Italian Style (Ennio de Concini, Alfredo Giannetti, Pietro Germi), A Man and a Woman (Claude LeLouch, Pierre Uytterhoeven), Missing (Costa-Gravas), Talk to Her (Pedro ´ Almodovar), and The Last Emperor (Bernardo Bertolucci). All seven of these films were from Western European countries. Stellar writer-directors Ingmar Bergman (five nominations) and Federico Fellini (eight nominations) never won writing awards. A number of awards have been received by writers from other Englishspeaking countries including the United Kingdom (Charlie Chaplin, George Bernard Shaw, Robert Bolt, John Briley, Peter Schaffer, Frederic Raphael, and Tom Stoppard), New Zealand (Peter Jackson), Ireland (Neil Jordan), and Australia (Jane Campion). THE CREATIVE PROCESS

The interviews we reviewed focused primarily on film writers’ professional experience. They highlighted aspects of the creative process, including work

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habits, the writing process, and surviving in the film business. Obviously more interviews were conducted with contemporary screenwriters, but we included perspectives from earlier eras as well. Motivation to Write Writers may be driven by a deep need to tell stories. Tom Schulman stated, “If you are a writer, you are never without a story to tell and never without a purpose in life” (Elbert, 1999, p. 29). There is also the power of motion pictures to reach a broad audience. John Briley (Gandhi) wrote, It had been my good fortune to fall into a profession where my work would be seen and responded to by all. . . . And if you wanted to make an impact, there was no better way for a writer to do so. And despite its egalitarian nature, I felt “the trade” gave me a certain sense of dignity, too. (Elbert, 1999, p. 136)

Deadlines create a pressure that can help get work completed. Walter Reisch (Titantic) recalled that at Fox, Zanuck would call you in to announce that he needed a picture in two weeks’ time and not a day later. And you didn’t have one day more. I worked to a deadline and I simply loved that way of working. It is very productive, you cannot stall, and if you are under pressure you always come up with something topical because you just don’t have time to do a lot of research. (Greenberg, 1991, p. 223)

Bo Goldman found deep pride and purpose in his work: “The thing I’ve striven the most for in my life is to produce art. I’m an artist. Screenwriting just happens to be the way I express it.” He added, “I approach writing the way Michelangelo approached a big block of marble or granite from which a statue was trying to fight its way out” (Engel, 2002, pp. 141–142). Paddy Chayefsky recognized that individuals may be attracted to writing because “the need for fame and notoriety I think is part of the package that brings you into show business” (Brady, 1981, p. 223). Money can also be a motivator. Walter Reisch said, “Nothing is more inspiring than to hear a man say, ‘Here’s a down payment!’” (Greenberg, 1991, p. 224). Work Habits Some writers treated screenwriting as a job in terms of maintaining regular work habits. Medford (1974) described James G. Webb’s (How The West Was Won) work ethic: “Since writing was his trade, he believed that writers should

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get at it and he was as systematic at getting at it as any writer I ever knew, almost disheartening for one not so systematic” (p. 12). I. A. L. Diamond recalled that when he wrote “with Billy (Wilder), when we start on a script, it’s ten to five, five days a week” (Froug, 1972, p. 152). At the other extreme, Julius Epstein (Casablanca) only worked from 12 noon to 2 p.m. – “Never more than two hours a day” (McGilligan, 1986, p. 192). Yet he wrote three pages a day. You can imagine why it did not work out when Julius Epstein tried to team up with Billy Wilder. The actual writing itself was joyful for some and agony for others. Ron Bass said, “The first draft is always a delight, the purest creative process” (Schanzer & Wright, 1993, p. 27). Woody Allen professed, “Nothing makes me happier than to tear open a big ream of yellow or white paper. And I can’t wait to fill it! I love to do it” (Bj¨orkman, 1993, p. 8). Alan Ball (America Beauty) found it difficult to get into writing: “When I sit down in front of the computer, all of a sudden cleaning the refrigerator becomes incredibly attractive” (Engel, 2002, p. 176). Tom Schulman writes “so fast because I live in fear during the writing that my story is going to fall apart. So when I write I get anxious, terribly anxious. . . . It’s a kind of all-night, trancelike torture” (Engel, 2002, p. 106). Callie Khouri said, I haven’t yet found a way to get up every day and go sit in my office for three hours. . . . I can’t just sit down and write anywhere. I need a feeling of isolation. Even in my own office, which I thought looked like a great working environment because I was in my own house, I still find I really need to be where there are no people and there’s simply nothing else to do but write. I can think of fifty ways to rearrange the top of my desk before I can write. (Schanzer & Wright, 1993, pp. 128–129)

Some writers recognize that they need to get into a flow state to write their best work. Bruce Jay Rubin (Ghost) stated, “If you are writing from the top of your head, that’s something else altogether, that’s just craft. I’ve had periods where that’s all I could do because there was no flow” (Schanzer & Wright, 1993, p. 111). Although the writers in the studios’ heyday often had to write in an office, some writers today work on assignments in coffee houses, the park, and libraries. Woody Allen prefers to write on a bed (Moss, 1980). Rubin checks into a hotel and will not leave until he finishes the script (Engel, 2002). This “lock yourself in the room until you finish” mentality goes back to at the least the 1930s when Robert Riskin (It Happened One Night) would go to a resort in the desert with director Frank Capra when they were working on a project. Many directors such as Capra and Hitchcock worked extensively on script development without taking a writing credit.

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Wherever they write, screenwriters need to find something that is intrinsically rewarding in the process. Marc Norman (Shakespeare in Love) stated that he kind of liked sitting in a pool of my own sweat: writing had begun to sneak up on me. . . . You better love the process of writing, because in the end that’s all you’re ever going to have. The praise and the blame you can’t control. All you can really expect from the work is the satisfaction you get from it. (Engel, 2002, p. 156)

Developing Ideas for Original Scripts Where does the inspiration for original films come from? Walter Reisch stated that when a producer “says he has a certain actor and wants you to write for this actor . . . my mind immediately functions in that direction. Half the battle is won. It is all geared towards a personality” (Greenberg, 1991, p. 224). Horton Foote described his process: I keep notebooks, and sometimes just a phrase in a notebook will start me off. I never know. I’ve also learned that you can’t really predict the time for the consolidation of the idea. You can use your will, and you can say, “I know this is wonderful – I’m going to make it work” and it just won’t do it. (Cincotti, 1997, p. 132)

Developing an idea into a story that really works is perhaps the greatest challenge of screenwriting. William Goldman stated, “The writing is never the problem, it’s knowing what the structure is and what goes where and who the people are and how this scene relates to this. . . . I have to know all that before I start” (1981, pp. 12–13). Writers pursue a variety of interesting methods to help realize their story. Robert Benton stated, When I’m writing a script, I tack up photos of the actors I have in mind, and I always have to be able to look up and see those pictures. I don’t know how many of those people will end up in the film, but by looking at those pictures I hear the voice of the actor, I sense their presence. (Keathley, 2006, p. 32)

Ring Lardner Jr. used the interesting strategy of writing his screenplay as a first-person present-tense novella because he thought it would be an easier read: “I had found out that the great obstacle in getting attention paid to a piece of writing in the movies is that people have to read it – and most screenplays don’t read very well, and treatments don’t either” (Strugatz & McGilligan, 1997, p. 203).

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Rewriting Rewriting is an essential part of the process, Rubin stated, “As you write, you start to discover the deadwood around what you’ve written. You have to trim it back and find the living branches, the source that really works” (Schanzer & Wright, 1993, p. 112). Working as a partner with a writer-director has its privileges. I. A. L. Diamond reported that, when he worked with Billy Wilder, “there is only one draft really, and a good part of the time, we don’t even have a finished script when we start shooting” (Froug, 1991, p. 151). Collaborating with Directors, Producers, Executives, and Actors Stempel (1991) argued that screenwriters have to know how to use the collaborative process to their best advantage. They have to learn how to hustle. The more the process of screenwriting moves away from the family feeling of silent films or the organized procedures of the studio system, the more the screenwriters have had to learn how to manipulate the system or, increasingly, the systems of filmmaking. (p. 228)

Some writers developed successful long-term collaborative relationships. Ruth Prawter Jhabavala worked primarily with one director, James Ivory: “I write the screenplay and show it to him and he tells me mostly what he doesn’t like . . . and then I redo it. And it might take over a period of two years or so” (Froug, 1996, p. 214). Others have found the process to be hit and miss as they work with different individuals. Frederic Raphael (Darling) discussed both types of relationships. He recalled that Joseph Janni who produced Darling would tell him something was missing: “I’d say, ‘Fine. What do you think it is?’ And he’d say, ‘I don’t know.’ But after a bit, you’d find he was right. It was the same with Stanley Kubrick. . . . [That’s] the way the movies should be” (Baxter, 2006, p. 341). However, while working on Darling Raphael was instructed to meet people who might be familiar with the world of his amoral, promiscuous lead character “as if Shakespeare, before being allowed to write King Lear, would have been required to meet with a certain number of dethroned monarchs of a certain age in order to discover what they had in common” (Baxter, 2006, p. 326). Because the often large numbers of producers and studio executives or individuals financing a movie may hold varying opinions, getting the green light to film becomes an obstacle course usually involving many rewrites. Julius Epstein commented, “Actors are ruining more scripts, I think. All the actors want to be known as improvisers, it seems – which I think is a terrible trend. . . . But most of them aren’t; they just think they are. A lot of damage is done” (McGilligan, 1986, p. 180).

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Auteurism, the notion that began in France that the director is the equivalent of an author of a film, makes many writers furious. I. A. L. Diamond voiced this view: Nobody goes around saying that architecture is a “contractor’s medium.” To say that the director is the “author” of a film is semantic nonsense. Unless he writes his own script, he’s an interpreter. As Frederic Raphael . . . put it, “A director who can’t originate a character or develop a situation is like a pastry cook who puts curlicues on somebody else’s cake.” (Froug, 1972, p. 166)

Walter Reisch argued that the studio system produced better movies because of the shared responsibility: “When the so-called auteur directors write everything, direct everything, cut and edit everything themselves, the end results turn out to be lopsided, cockeyed” (Greenberg, 1991, p. 224). However many writers agree that writer-directors are able to protect their viewpoint and realize their vision. Joel Coen stated, “What makes us different from other directors is the way we work. When we’ve finished writing a scenario we always remain close to it. There are no big surprises. That’s why our scenarios are so detailed” (Cahiers du Cinema, 2006, p. 116). The Business of Writing The happiest writers figure out a way to beat the system and make films they would like to do. Of course, directing is one way to achieve what is close to autonomy – at least as long as your films make money. Woody Allen has churned out a film a year for more than 30 years. Most of his films have not grossed a lot at the box office, but they have a relatively low budget so they usually make a profit. Ron Bass set up his own organization: “my team – the people I employ as a sort of private development group” (Engel, 2002, p. 51). Bass said that he did not know of anybody else who used this method: “But in a way it’s essentially what happens in the development process at a studio. . . . Legitimate criticisms and feedback . . . is (sic) what every writer needs” (pp. 61–62). Edward Anhalt hired people to do research and handle all the details so he could focus on writing. In addition, many writers support a network of industry workers such as agents, managers, and lawyers who might help them get work, public relations firms who help them stay in the spotlight, and business managers to help manage their money. Today’s Tensions The competition to sell screenplays is as intense as it has ever been. The Nicholl Award, a script-writing competition sponsored by the Academy of

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Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, received more than 5,000 entries in 2006. New classes of students are graduating from film schools every year, and sometimes it seems that almost everybody in Los Angeles has a script to sell. Robin Williams told a story about a cop who stopped him and tried to peddle a treatment. Big budget writers need to worry about how well their films do at the box office because the cost per film keeps going up, which makes the stakes higher. Sequels and threequels leave fewer openings for original scripts. Truly original scripts have difficulty getting sold because they are riskier. CONCLUSION

This chapter provided an overview of the personal characteristics as well as statistical information concerning Oscar-winning screenwriters. There are many more questions beyond the scope of this chapter that we hope can be approached in future research. For example, how do nominees and nonwinners compare to award winners in terms of careers, family history, and longevity? Are there differences between comedy and drama winners? How do screenwriters compare to other writers such as novelists, nonfiction writers, and poets? Eminent screenwriters register wide individual differences in their approaches to writing, their enjoyment of the writing process, and their philosophy about dealing with the pressures of the business. However, we suspect that screenwriters, for all their complaints, must be at least partially closet optimists. There is always hope that the next script will be the big one. Many writers as they struggle with script problems may take a moment to fantasize themselves at the podium clutching their Oscar and thanking all the people who helped them get there. After all, Hollywood is the land of dreams.

references Baxter, J. (2006). Frederic Raphael: Renaissance man. In P. McGilligan (Ed.), Backstory 4: Interviews with screenwriters of the 1970s and 1980s (pp. 317–343). Berkeley: University of California Press. Bj¨orkman, S. (1993). Woody Allen on Woody Allen: In conversation with Stig Bj¨orkman. New York: Grove Press. Brady, J. (1981). The craft of the screenwriter. New York: Simon & Schuster. Cahiers du Cinema. (2006). The Hollywood interviews. Oxford: Berg. Cincotti, J. A. (1997). Horton Foote: The trip from Wharton. In P. McGilligan (Ed.), Backstory 3: Interviews with screenwriters of the 1960s (pp. 114–134). Berkeley: University of California Press. Considine, S. (2000). Mad As hell: The life and work of Paddy Chayefsky. Lincoln, NE: Iuniverse.com. Dardis, T. (1976). Some time in the sun. New York: Scribners. Elbert, L. T. (Ed.). (1999). Why we write: Personal statements and photographic portraits of 25 top screenwriters. Los Angeles: Silman-James Press.

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Engel, J. (1995). Screenwriters on screenwriting. New York: Hyperion. Engel, J. (2002). Oscar-winning screenwriters on screenwriting. New York: Hyperion. Froug, W. (1972). The screenwriter looks at the screenwriter. New York: Macmillan. Froug, W. (1991). The new screenwriter looks at the new screenwriter. Los Angeles: Silman-James Press. Froug, W. (1996). Zen and the art of screenwriting. Beverly Hills: Silman-James Press. Garrett. D. (2007, August 10). Writers scramble amid strike phobia: Scripters racing to line up multiple deals. Variety. Retrieved from http://www.variety.com/article/ VR1117970074.html?categoryid=1019&cs=1&query=writers+scramble. Goldman, W. (1969). Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. New York: Bantam. Goldman, W. (1981). Word into image: Portraits of American screenwriters. Los Angeles: American Film Foundation. Goldman, W. (1983). Adventures in the screen trade. New York: Warner Books. Greenberg, J. (1991). Walter Reisch: The tailor. In P. McGilligan (Ed.), Backstory 2: Interviews with screenwriters of the 1940s and 1950s (pp. 201–245). Berkeley: University of California Press. Hunt, D. M. (2007). The 2007 Hollywood Writers Report: Whose stories are we telling? Los Angeles: Writers Guild of America, West. Katz, E. (Ed.). (2005). The film encyclopedia (5th ed.). New York: HarperCollins. Kaufman, J. C. (2003). The cost of the muse: Poets die young. Death Studies, 27, 813–821. Keathley, C. (2006). Robert Benton, the new traditionalist. In P. McGilligan (Ed.), Backstory 4: Interviews with screenwriters of the 1970s and 1980s (pp. 11–36). Berkeley: University of California Press. Medford, H. (1974, November). James Ruffin Webb. WGAw News, p. 12. Moss, R. F. (1980). Creators on creating: Woody Allen. Saturday Review, 7, 40–44. Norman, M. (2007). What happens next? A history of American screenwriting. New York: Harmony Books. Parish, R. J. (2007). It’s good to be the king: The seriously funny life of Mel Brooks. Hoboken, NJ: Wiley. Piirto, J. (2002). My teeming brain: Understanding creative writers. Cresskill, NJ: Hampton Press. Rothenberg, A., & Wyshak, G. (2004). Family background and genius. Canadian Journal of Psychiatry, 49(3), 185–191. Schanzer, K., & Wright, T. L. (1993). American screenwriters. New York: Avon Books. Schwartz, N. L., & Schwartz, S. (1982). The Hollywood writers’ wars. New York: Knopf. Simonton, D. K. (1994). Greatness: Who makes history and why. New York: Guilford. Simonton, D. K. (2002). Collaborative aesthetics in the feature film: Cinematic components predicting the differential impact of 2,323 Oscar-nominated movies. Empirical Studies of the Arts, 20(2), 115–125. Simonton, D. K. (2004). Film awards as indicators of cinematic creativity and achievement: A quantitative comparison of the Oscars and six alternatives. Creativity Research Journal, 16(2/3), 163–172. Spoto, D. (1990). Madcap: The life of Preston Sturges. Boston: Little, Brown. Stempel, T. (1991). Framework. New York: Continuum. Strugatz, B., & McGilligan, P. (1997). Ring Lardner Jr: American skeptic. In P. McGilligan (Ed.), Backstory 3: Interviews with screenwriters of the 1960s (pp. 193–229). Berkeley: University of California Press. Walker, J. (Ed.). (2003). Halliwell’s Who’s Who in the movies. New York: HarperResource. Wilk, M. (2004). Schmucks with Underwoods. New York: Applause.

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appendix a Writers Whose Interviews and Information in Addition to Life Expectancy and Age at Winning the Academy Award Were Included or Reviewed Woody Allen ´ Pedro Almodovar Edward Anhalt Edna Anhalt Alan Ball Ronald Bass Robert Benton Bernardo Bertolucci Robert Bolt Muriel Box Sidney Box John Briley Marshall Brickman James L. Brooks Mel Brooks Richard Brooks Charles Brackett Sidney Buchman Jane Campion Paddy Chayefsky Ethan Coen Joel Coen Pierre Collings Ennio de Concini Francis Ford Coppola Sofia Coppola Cameron Crowe Julius J. Epstein Carl Foreman Costa-Gavras I A L Diamond Joseph Farnham John Farrow Horton Foote Pietro Germi Alfredo Giannetti Bo Goldman William Goldman

Paul Haggis Ben Hecht Sidney Howard John Huston William Inge John Irving Peter Jackson Ruth Prawer Jhabvala Neil Jordan Michael Kanin Charlie Kaufman Michael Kelley Callie Khoury Norman Krasna Albert Lamorisse Ring Lardner Jr. Jeremy Larner Claude LeLouch Cecil Lewis Michael Kanin Callie Khoury Alan Jay Learner Claude Lelouch Sonya Levien Herman J. Mankiewicz Joseph L. Mankiewicz Charles MacArthur Frances Marion Leo McCary Marc Norman Alexander Payne S. J. Perelman Frank Pierson Mario Puzo Frederic Raphael Walter Reisch Robert Riskin Eric Roth

Bruce Joel Rubin Waldo Salt Alvin Sargent Tom Schulman Pierre Uytterhoeven John Patrick Shanley George Bernard Shaw Sidney Sheldon Stirling Silliphant Donald Ogden Stewart Oliver Stone Tom Stoppard Preston Sturges Ted Tally Quentin Tarantino Robert Towne Alfred Uhry Earl Wallace Pamela Wallace James R. Webb Orson Welles William A. Wellman Claudine West Michael Wilson Stephan Zallian

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Age at first award, 1928–2006 (n = 197) with moving average (period = 20 winners).

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Age at death by award date (awards 1928–1985) (n = 121) with moving average (period = 20 winners).

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5 The Tears of a Clown: Understanding Comedy Writers scott barry kaufman and aaron kozbelt

Humor is an important part of the human condition. A world without laughter would be a world without a soul. Indeed, comedy serves many key purposes in life – reducing stress, defusing social tensions, revealing the absurdity of human behavior, and generally increasing the quality of life (Martin, 2007). One main vehicle by which funny thoughts are conveyed is through creative writing, which can blunt the edge of potentially controversial topics, evoke feelings of mirth in the reader, and contribute to increasing the audience’s health through laughter. Comedy writing takes many forms: stand-up comedy writing, sitcom writing, political satire writing as seen on The Daily Show, comedy screenwriting, comedy writing for Web sites like Cracked or The Onion, and literary fiction writing with a humorous bent. It varies from the attempts of a novice short story writer to the aesthetic achievements of Cervantes, Rabelais, and Shakespeare. Indeed, nearly any form of creative writing can be enhanced by humor. But behind every punch line is a person generating that line. What do we know about comedy writers? What are they like? Humor has been the subject of a great deal of speculation and, more recently, a rather impressive array of empirical research (Martin, 2007) on a variety of humor-related topics. For instance, research has examined the link between humor and psychological well-being (Kuiper & Martin, 1998; Martin & Lefcourt, 1983; Ruch, 1997), the link between humor and physical well-being (Cogan, Cogan, Waltz, & McCue, 1987; Lefcourt, Davidson-Katz, & Kueneman, 1990; Martin & Dobbin, 1988; McClelland & Cheriff, 1997), defining characteristics of funny jokes (Attardo, 1997; Koestler, 1964; Raskin, 1985; Wyer & Collins, 1992), social aspects of humor (Apter, 1982; Long & Graesser, 1988; Mulkay, 1988; Robinson & SmithLovin, 2001), the psychobiology of humor and laughter (Bachorowski, Smoski, & Owen, 2001; Coulson & Kutas, 2001; Goel & Dolan, 2001; Provine & Yong, 1991), the development of humor in children (Barnett, 1990; Johnson & Mervis, 1997; McGhee, 1980), the evolutionary emergence of the human capacity 80

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for humor (Kaufman, Kozbelt, Bromley, & Miller, 2007; Storey, 2002), and the cognitive processes involved in humor appreciation or comprehension (Eysenck, 1942; Suls, 1972; Vaid, Hull, Heredia, Gerkens, & Martinez, 2003). Considerably less research has investigated cognitive processes underlying humor production and the psychological correlates of individuals who are capable of consistently generating high-quality humor. Such persons range from the class clown in school to internationally famed humor writers and stand-up comedians. How can we understand the nature of humor, particularly its production, as manifested in creative writing and elsewhere? In cognitive and personality terms, how can we characterize humorous individuals – including creative writers? To what extent do findings about funny people in general inform the humorous side of creative writing and creative writers? To address these questions, we characterize different styles of humor production and review the correlates of humor production ability in the general population. We finish with a look at the psychology of the professional comedian as a possible means of understanding humor in creative writing. FLAVORS OF HUMOR AND THEIR RELATI